MUSIC, SINGING AND MENTAL HEALTH, WITH NACHO DIAZ

Nacho Diaz is a sociologist and PhD student at the Centre for Narrative Research, CNR, University of East London under the direction of Maria Tamboukou. His professional life has taken place in different psychiatric hospitals and prisons, in the field of reinsertion. He has also worked with different NGOs.

So I am spending this beautiful morning with Nacho Diaz at the South Bank Centre. Nacho is a sociologist and writer who founded the group “Four in Ten”, the LGBT service users organization at the Maudsley Hospital. I read his collaborations in the Spanish digital diary Politica Local, and the multiple activities that he does, but finally opt for asking him how he would introduce himself for the Singing4Health publication. This is what he said.

Nacho: I am many things yes. I am a bipolar, writer, PhD candidate, mental health activist and performer.

Maria: We are here today to talk about singing.

Nacho: I am also a performer who unfortunately doesn't have the ability to sing well. However, I love singing with all my heart.

Maria: How does singing and music benefit you?

Nacho: Music makes me stabilize my moods. I listen to music all the time. When I'm at home,

working, studding or writing I listen to music, I have various choices, I listen to radio 3 or depending on the day or the hour I listen to jazz or to some sort of new musics that make me feel good.

I think that music gives me a sense of calm and relax. When I need different kings of inspirations to write, I listen to Spotify and review my musical taste over the years.

Over my life I have managed to overcome bad experiences listening to music. And when I understand the lyrics of a good song, I try to get immerse in that song and create my own fantasy about it.

Maria: What about the physical fact of yourself singing?

Nacho: I love singing and I love to be in a stage.

Whenever I am in a stage and I try to perform, would like to give the best of me, but I sing whenever I can. Before I was diagnosed my singing used to be a symptom or my stress, anguish or my anxiety. It's like I existed through music.

My first childhood memories where watching singers, feeling the special magic of Paloma San Basilio. I know she is in a way a gay icon and also for many Opus Day people, I don't really know or understand the connection but I've seen this quite often in Spain.

I suppose I saw in Paloma a very special kind of femininity. She represented to me some very happy, joyful and innocent feelings. Even if she would talk about adultery, she would do it in such a sweet way... Paloma was in a way my model.

Maria: Has singing been important at some point?

Nacho: I have met lots of bipolar people like me who ended up subscribing to Spotify too to regulate their moods and creating playlists for their different moods. I also met other people who need the background music in order to have a peaceful existence in their homes.

Maria: So this is something you recommend.

Music? Absolutely. And it's not just about singing, but about listening to the music!

The book I am writing and part of my PhD will include talking about some music and singing memories, as it comes in many ways from images and memories I have from my childhood. When I performed as a woman singing “chica yeye” I had this memory from my childhood of the actress who would normally sing it, Conchita Velasco.

Maria: Any British or American singers?

Frank Sinatra was my hero. Dean Martin. In my teens my father used to travel to London quite often and used to bring me the top 1 in the lists, so in a small provincial town I had the chance to spend a lot of time on my own listening to Rick Ashley, Bananarama, Donna Summer, Diana Rose and disco music from the 70s.

Maria: In what way have you related your singing to your writing?

Nacho: I am a writer, and learned the tricks of my trade by listening to tangos. I also love coplas, because they are stories that people sing, and that's what I'm after.

Shall we sing? -said I. Nacho sings with energy and extroversion.

And this is all for today.

Be Your Own Choir Leader

Actually, the tittle says it all so I won't need to extend myself too much this time. What I want to mean is that we all, as musicians, as choir leaders or directors, want to do our best, to know more, to get better ideas, to produce more engaging rehearsals. Great.

What perhaps is not necessary (and not even effective) is to change our personality.

Talking here is a person who is not exactly the image of the “fear of God” martinet. Let's say, not the most assertive look you can find. If you identify with this, you can probably empathize easily with the many times I felt I “had to” look more strict, more “in control” and things of that kind, specially when in front of unruly students.

Eighteen years after I had to conduct my first choir ever...I have been totally unable to change my demeanor. I felt I looked like nobody could ever be in awe of me in the slightest. Like students would speak during my lessons and a look of mine would never be enough for them to stop chatting, whereas I could see others had the ability of generating silence around them just by entering the room. I always admired that quality that I never had.

In my first years of teaching I experimented with advice from others, observing other teachers, and tried to become a person that I was not... for a few minutes every time, but I proved to be unsuccessful. And one does not really know how it happens, but you get into developing the students songs, talking with them, collaborating and listening...and time passes... and one day I was told I looked confident.

I was shocked. I had never been told that before.

And I have still the same unchallenging demeanor, same easy-going personality.

What changed was perhaps that I decided which was going to be my kind of 'audience' and where I shouldn't go because I would find it too hard. It was to sometimes let people talk because they need it, and find that actually they had something special to say. It was to feel at ease with people. It was shared joy, and laughs when something doesn't work. It was a long talk in the pub with the unruly one, and finding out what an interesting person he could be, and the reasons for the many interruptions of my lessons.

I invited the 'unruly' student to help me in one of my sessions for people with learning difficulties. It was a discovery, and since then he got involved in helping other singers with more difficulties for learning the music than himself.

I still don't have an imposing presence.

The difference is that now I don't try to have it.

(What a relief).

I feel trusted.

WW1 LIVE MUSIC AT OUR FUNDRISING CONCERT BY RADIO DAYS AND THE BLOOMSBURY CHOIR

Christmas Truce: A Concert for Peace

Singing4Health CIC is organizing a fundraising Christmas concert in aid of the Bloomsbury Patient Network. All proceeds from the event will be used to fund the provision of music activities of The Bloomsbury Choir. With specialist in the music of this era, Radio Days Music.
The concert is a commemoration of the 1914 Christmas Truce on the Western Front, when British and German soldiers exchanged seasonal greetings and sung Christmas carols together. To celebrate that event, the fundraising concert for peace will bring together on stage Radio DaysMusic, who specializes in Edwardian music and songs from the times of the Great War, The Bloomsbury Choir, community volunteers from Richmond, and special guests – teachers from the German School London.

Songs from the Great War years, interleaved with little known stories, will capture the spirit of the era, telling the story of the rush to war and of the war resisters. The finale of the concert will be a candlelit performance “Stille Nacht, heilige Nacht”.
Dec 12, 7.30pm, Old Town Hall, Richmond, adults £15, concessions £10, bloomsburynetwork.co.uk/tickets

ON BEAUTY AND CREATIVITY, WITH MENNO KUIJPER

I am interviewing Menno Kuijper, a great cabaret artist based in London, a very clear mind and a lovely person. I wanted to know more about his views on Cabaret and the way that music and song writing has become an important part not only of his career but also of his personal development. Our talk was long (it will give me scope for a second episode on Cabaret). This is an excerpt of our discussion.

Maria: When did you start writing?

Menno: From a very young age I was always writing stories, or singing or drawing, I used to draw loads, and all these things are about story telling, but just in different ways.  In my teens, and especially in my twenties, I gravitated much more towards the songwriting, but always more from the point of view of the lyrics and the idea of the song rather than melodically putting a song together.  I don’t really consider myself a ‘melody’ person as I’ve never learned to play an instrument and think ‘OK, I should work together with people who really understand music and melodies’, but having worked with composers I’m now beginning to think more in terms of melodies and instruments, how we could harmonise it...so that's quite new to me.

One morning I woke up and I had a melody in my head and I didn't know where it came from!  It was just there in my head, kind of sad and melancholic, and the words where just there!  So I quickly got my phone, recorded myself humming the tune and wrote down the words, and within minutes had it all down. I looked at the words and the thought “What the hell is this? What the hell is this song? Where did it came from?”  It's called “Fuck me senseless!” I just thought “How bizarre”, and I looked at the lyrics and I thought “Is this me?”, “Are this things I feel?”, “Is this desire on my part?” or “Is it just something that came out of a dream?” Who knows!

Maria: You are a very good lyricist.  Do you see yourself as someone who tells stories through music?

Menno:   I’ve always seen myself as a storyteller before I call myself a singer or a performer – its about the story telling.  I like to write, I like to perform, I like to sing, I like to draw, I like to put songs together... it's all about taking something and find the right way to express it.  So, what form is it going to take? What I really like is when something takes shape by itself, to have a very organic approach. And I think this is something I'm focusing much more now, like you have an idea and you just go with it, you don't have a plan, you just see what happens.

Maria: Has story telling help you survive to some extent?

Menno: Yes, I guess, I was always in this fantasy world.  I remember my mum, she used to check up on me when I was supposed to be sleeping and then she would say “You're still awake!” and I'd say “Yes, I’ve got too much going on in my head”. Now, of course, as a child, you don't have stuff like bills or your job to worry about, so it was all fantasy and weird stuff!

Maria: so did you get rid of so much stuff going on or you always got more?

Menno: Well, I think that from the age of about six-seven I got bullied a lot in school because I was quite girly, and not like a ‘traditional boy’, so I think it was part a escapism. My dad would say to me “get out of that pink cloud”, and by “pink cloud” he meant this fantasy world I lived in, because I was always bumping into walls or breaking things. I tried to sit on the sofa once and I sat over the side table instead and broke this beautiful lamp that my mother had inherited. So that was always like a drama because I was like “in another world” most of the time, so he just wanted me to get my feet on the ground. That's why he said “get of that pink cloud!”, and I never liked that because I didn't understand it, I would think “what pink cloud? I'm not on a cloud! I can't see it!”. But I would just be writing, writing, writing stuff...and then when I was a teenager I wanted to perform, I had seen cabaret artists and comedians on TV and I thought “Oh, I wanna do that!”. And I started doing some performing in high school. And then I started to write songs, but in Dutch.

Maria: Cabaret has to do with critic. It can be very political. Does that help you express your ideas?

Menno: For me, nowadays it’s even more like that, I have a clear point to get something across. As a teenager it was mostly whimsical stuff, but now I want to write a whole play about religious based homophobia, which of course, stirs up a lot of emotions.

Maria: The song you sang the other day “Equal opportunity shagger”, makes a point!

Menno: yes, and what's really interesting about that is that I've performed it in different places and it does make a point on how people today face online dating, and how we use apps and meeting apps for sex purely, how you commodify people and you don't see people as a person but just as a body, people can look at you as a collection of body parts, and “Do you have all the body parts that I want in one body?” Or “Do I even care about your body? --I just want a particular type of penis”. It get's broken down and compartmentalized so much.  It's not about knowing someone anymore.

Maria: that's interesting, specially coming from someone who also works for the beauty industry. Do you relate those thoughts to that other job?

Menno:  I see it as something very different and separate, I've never consciously related it to the work I do for hair salons (because I also work with hair salons and spas and beauty saloons).

Maria: That has a lot to do with people who want to look good.

Menno: Or feel good.

Maria: We do live in a day and age where the physical is very much emphasised all the time.

Menno: Yes, if you look at all those girls in adverts and see how much they've been enhanced, through lightning, through make up, afterwards in photoshop their eyes are made bigger, the jaw line is made sharper...or whatever, so much of what we are presented is fabricated, and I am quite political about this. “Equal opportunity shagger” is about, “Lets be a bit more open minded”.

Maria: and it's a beautiful song.

Menno: I did it in a bar in Dublin, and one guy heard it and came to me afterwards and he was saying “Actually, that really made me think”, and that is to me a great compliment, because as a story teller I like to do two things: I like to inform and entertain. Together. But if someone gets more from the informing part that I do, that to me is the end goal. And it's not that I say “I know everything and this is what you should be thinking”, that is not what it is about, but obviously, you go through life, you observe things, and you want to address them.

Maria: what is beauty for you?

Menno: Away from performance?

Maria: Away from performance.

Menno: it's all about the eyes and the feeling a person has around them. At the end of the day if I find someone who is very grounded a very calm, then that's beautiful, ‘cause I tend to be all over the place and need someone to balance that.  And someone who is understanding and is open, that is beautiful. 

Menno and myself spent some minutes improvising, and this is part of what happened next. A most enjoyable morning!




 © Maria Soriano 2014, Singing4Health

INTO THE SMALL -- CONTRIBUTING TO MAKING A STRONG COMMUNITY

When you already belong to a community, have you ever thought that perhaps you know eveyone you need to know and there is no need to know more people?

Or you believe you need to meet many more people in order to have access to either fun activities, network more, have more friends or access specific information?

What if looking to the people you already have around you discover you don't really know them?

Not talking about people who feel isolated and not belonging to any kind of groups, but being part of a choir or any other community group can be so rewarding if you really get to know who is around you that you would be surprised of the reach that can have. We get used to belong to different networks, neighbourhood, parents association, dance lesson, choir, community groups... and many times pass through them not really getting to know people and not allowing ourselves the opportunity for discovery of what we already have around.

When I started to get to know better the people in my choir, I realized so much potential and so much richness, that I never felt the need of trying to meet anyone else. Although of course I will, this is just to say: think of so much people you might be having right at your side, and how little you know about them. If you approach and open up to them and listen to their stories, you will realize how much more interesting everything is around you, how many fascinating people circulate through our lives every day and we are unaware of it, thinking that perhaps one day we will meet someone more special or more interesting.

Your community will become stronger the better you get to know each other, so that you will also naturally stand by each other and create bonds and offer support in a way that rushing one activity after the other won't. 

Special people is all around you, in whatever tribe you already belong to. 

You are already surrounded by the most interesting people. Get to know them.

Just open your eyes, open your ears, and enjoy and acknowledge that immense potential.

  © Maria Soriano, 2014

FOOD, VOICE AND RISKS...WITH MOISES PÉREZ

Moisés Pérez is one of the founders of MuOm, the Barcelona overtone singing choir, very unique and beautiful music project that visited London last 25th and 26th July. They use techniques such as "overtone singing" and "throat singing", that come from Tuva, Mongolia, Tibet and also the Xhosa people in South Africa.
Moisés is the only Spanish person who has ever participated in a competition of troat singing in Tuva. He stayed at home for a few nights and I had the chance and pleasure to talk with him about music, singing, health, love, life and more... and this is a part of what happened.

Maria: What did you study?

Moises: I studied Biology in University as Undergraduate. But I've never felt a Biologist. Or nothing.

Ma: And how does one feels like “a biologist”?

Mo: I have never felt like anything. There are people who can say “I'm a biologist”. I studied biology. To “be”... I don't know “what” I am. But I worked in waste water treatments with natural systems and involved for various years in a government department for sewage discharges licenses.

Ma: And even if you “are” not a biologist, why did you choose Biology?

Mo: When I was a teenager, what was really doing was to study music in Conservatory, up to the professional degree: four years of guitar, sol-fa, two years of harmony, a couple of years of singing... but I was in a way “obliged” by my parents to study a degree... so I left Madrid to study in another city, expand myself and explore other disciplines. I started to do contemporary dance, theatre... joined an amateur Peruvian music group, in which we played flutes, and that was a great experience... but it felt like life was taking me through other paths, I was also very active in the ecologist movement, had a lot of meetings about it and music had to take a second position.

Ma: Are you vegetarian for environmental reasons or for any other reasons?
Mo: I started being vegetarian when I was 19, but well, I don't consider myself to be really a vegetarian, or I don't define myself as such. In the beginning it started because I had a shock doing some practices on arthropods in Galicia because a sea warm I had to kill to preserve it, and then I forgot about it and the bottle got rotten... that made me felt really bad about senseless and futile deaths, all that was really very intense for me. I don't know, but that was a very strong experience.

I have always felt very connected to nature, and this experience made me think and reconsider my way of eating animals. I've had many stages, sometimes I eat animals, others I didn't, for health and environmental reasons, but it was after a Vipassana retirement various days doing meditation ten hours a day, where I not just thought about it but I also felt it: it really came from inside, I felt I didn't really want to do that. I prefer to avoid it.

Since them I am more strict about it, but I still eat meat occasionally. For example when I was in Tuva, the nomads kill animals specially to give you meat, and I didn't felt like I should say no to them.

Ma: Are we what we eat? Do we sing what we eat?

Mo: It does affect the vibes. In our group we have the tendency to have a healthy way of eating. Not that we should be obsessed about it because that could also be insane, but going beyond if you eat meat or not, most of us look for ecological products, or raw products, with a lot of enzymes, with a lot of life energy, that in the end will have some repercussion in your body and your energy. And I'm sure that this will also help for singing.

Ma: Give us a recipe for a concert.
Some hours of fast, lots of water.

Mo: That doesn't make you weak?
Not really, I think that so that you can really lower your diaphragm is best that all that area is empty. And also a lot of being concentrated in what you have to do, so that external organizational factors can't affect you. I prefer to be in retreat and focused in what I am going to do. I also avoid chocolate.

Ma:Do you think that affects at all?

Mo: It does. It creates mucus. And on the days before a concert I avoid flours and dairy products.

Ma: So you think there can be mindful singing and mindful eating?(Laughs)
Mo: Yes... to me it's all linked. It's about how you live your life according to what you feel it's important, so you blend it all. Singing is part of my own process, the same as being part of consume co-operatives and creating them, so that you help the ecological agriculturist who respects and values environment, so you value this and buy from him. And these aspects are all important to me.

Ma: What matters to you?
Mo: To be well. I believe that the most important is to be well, because in reality everything external is just external. Maybe I give it importance because I want to promote someone's well being and with my actions I try to help to have a better world, to promote certain structures. But in the end what matters the most is to be well with yourself because you can be a great ecologist and very important, but be a jerk.

Ma: I recently had someone talking to me about how dangerous can it be to construct your identity in the things you do. “If I sing in this choir, that is my identity, that I do gigs...” so if you loose your voice, what are you going to do?

Mo: That has happened to me and it was a great lesson. It happened to me while learning khoomei (Tuva's throat singing) and later on in critical moments, like going to record a CD and loosing my voice, and with all the load of work that I was putting into the group, I am also trying to relax myself about this, as I have been putting some pressure sometimes on it to pull the group forward. In the end live was telling me “be calmed and quiet”, so I try to be as calm and fair as possible rather than being with lots of emotional ups and downs.

Ma: How are you now?
Mo: I feel fine! I think I am in a moment of my life in which I feel very much connected to something very and deep inside myself, my own life purposes, and I am feeling like everything will be okay. I am also an optimist!

Coming to England has also been a great step for MuOm, and it feel like we are finally coming out of our frontiers and even if it's symbolic, this means a materialization of our intention, so there is a part of me that is put to rest because of this.

Ma: Would you like to sing something?
Mo: Okay.

Ma: Whatever you like. And I might join...or not...I don't know.
Mo: I can make a drown for you, with a harmonic of 5^th, and then you can find where to fit in. I won't move too much from there.

Ma: You do as you like. But if you feel like moving... just do it.
Mo: Well, I might move a bit.

(Laughs)

Mo: You are a provoker!
(Laughs)

Ma: I can't help it!

Mo: Because this thing I've just done, I normally don't do.

Ma: Ah, so you do this sometimes?
Mo: It's inspired in the Chukotka singing.

Ma: Blimey, what is that?
Mo: I had before seen the Inuit singing in a video doing something somehow similar, but then I had the opportunity to meet this Chukotka woman and she showed me this. Chukotka is a part of Siberia close to the Bering Strait. Their singing is very interesting, very guttural and very ancestral. Inuit do it between two women together, I recommend you to see this because it's breath taking.

Two Inuit women place each other in front of the other and it's a vocal game with some rules and connotations. What they do is to make one kind of sound when the voice comes out and other when taking a breath in, in a rhythmical way. They can then make changes on their vocal game, and the other woman has to follow, and if she doesn't follow they laugh or just stop the whole thing.

It's very interesting because you can see what they do can get really complex in rhythm and it's really amazing.

Ma: In my case, I had no idea about this. I just have my headphone and I am “there”. I mean, I am must listening and reacting to what you are doing.
Mo: Yes, I can see. That is why you are a great provoker.

(Laughs).

And you took me to places where it's normally harder for me to get.

Ma: It's fun. I didn't know that there is an Inuit doing something any similar, as to me is about listening and because I am not trying to do anything or not doing it, that is just what I feel like.

Mo: And this is a good starting point, this is what I use to say to my students, that it's about exploring your voice. You can later shape it in a way or another in order to present it to an audience, but if you have not explored it you won't find certain things.

Mo: Also, after this you can create a work of conscience. If you put some conscience to what your are allowing to happen, you may find something you have done and then you can learn how you did it so that you can do it again. If you are able to retain what is was, that moment, perhaps you can even come back to it.

Ma: I understand that even if you don’t understand it or make the effort to retain it, once you did it, it's already in your “circuit”.

Mo: It's easier. Easier to do it again.

Ma: So with practice it can happen again by it's own. Even if you where unable to retain that moment, your body did it, so your body has in a way “learned” it. It's there somewhere. It will be easier to let it happen again. Even during a singing lesson, sometimes the singing student's anxiety for trying to do again something that came out “well”, like “gosh, I did that right! I want to do that again!”. And that makes exactly that you cannot do it again!

Mo: Maybe its more about “re-cognizing” so that when it happens again, you can recognize it again, and so when you have recognized it a number of times, you can then produce it, more than forcing yourself into it at all cost.

Ma: I believe that if you did it once... you know you can...
Mo: I also explain when teaching overtone singing techniques. The body is wise. Students are exploring and sometimes comes out something really sharp, and that is the way to go forward... so if you put your ear in it then your body can register it without having to look for something specific, because there are so many micro movements and adjustments that one needs doing that we cannot really have all that in mind at the same time. There are so many factors that is very complex to think about all this. Your body processes at a much faster speed if we don't put the rational factor into it. So if you put your internal ear instead of your head, then your body can get there on it's own.

Ma: The body on it's own before your mind. The mind is fast... but the body can be faster.

Mo: Of course. Rationalizing it's a process that can take time, so this is passing through another circuit.

Ma: Maybe If you don't risk to do anything new, you won't know your voice well enough.

Mo: Yes, because your voice talks about your limits. So if you really begin to truly explore it, even if it sounds however it may sound, it doesn't matter, or if anyone can think aesthetically what the f*** are you doing?

Ma: Exactly. This recording we have just done, we may want to display it publicly or not... but is not about that.
Mo: No... it's important that one has fun too.

Ma: Did you have fun?

Mo: Yes.
Ma: Me too.

 © Maria Soriano 2014, Singing4Health

MuOM, BARCELONA HARMONIC SINGING CHOIR

And now for something completely different, I want to speak about harmonic singing.

Also known as overtone singing, is a type of singing in which the singer manipulates the sounds created as air travels from the lungs, passing the vocal folds and out of the lips to produce a melody. This way the singer can produce two sounds at the same time, and even three!

I can't really say more about it of what you can google around, but I really wanted to introduce you to a lovely choir from Barcelona that performs this special kind of singing that is used traditionally in various countries and cultures like in Mongolia, in Siberia, Tibet, Pakistan and even the Inuit and in Sardinia.

MuOm is a Barcelona based ensemble that uses harmonic singing and Mongolian throat singing with a unique concept of connecting to their audiences. They not only make audience sing with them during a part of their performances, but are able to choreography, design and conceptualize every performance so that there is always really interesting happening all the time.

MuOm has just visited London and Wales for the first time, giving two concerts in London (St Peter's Church in Vauxhall and St Etherlburga's Centre for Peace and Reconciliation) plus one at Llangollen Fringe Festival 2014.(Find more information here).

Even if as a choir singer you are not specifically interested in practising harmonic singing, I can assure you that this practice does indeed make your voice richer in tone, and at the same time helps with your concentration, as it can be meditative and calming.

I had the pleasure to lodge at home one of the singers and founder of the choir, Moisés Perez, and that was a fantastic opportunity to talk about music, singing, live, songs, choirs... and more music and how that is good for your body and your mind. We have recorded a podcast together that will come out as soon as I have the time to translate it into English.

Thanks to Cumie Dunio for making contact, and thanks to all the fabulous singers who decided to show up and sing with us at a party in London the day before.

It was a lovely experience to be at the concert at St Peter's Church in Vauxhall. My arms and legs felt softer after listening one hour of this fabulous music. A truly unique experience that I will recommend again should they visit UK again.