IT'S FLAMENCO SINGING TIME!

I did something really special this Easter holidays, and that was to spend some days in Almeria (Spain), where my family comes from. I had the chance to listen to Lidia Plaza and her group of flamenco musicians (David Rodriguez -guitar, Salvador Martos -percussion and Chochi Duré -accordion) at La Guajira.

Lovely music, very well assembled musicians, a good choice of repertoire, with modern and early flamenco pieces (as it corresponds to a living tradition) and superb interpretation by the voice of Lidia Garcia. I couldn't miss the opportunity of a short interview on how singing makes a flamenco singer feel. She noticed me inmediately as I walked close to the back door, and came to find me, and warmly agreed to meet us after the concert for a chat.

How did you start singing flamenco?

It runs in my family. My father used to sing flamenco and

play guitar, so I've been listening to this kind of music since I was a kid. I didn't start singing myself until I was 29 years, so that was quite late. I joined a music school in Roquetas that had a flamenco workshop with flamenco singing lessons, so there I went.

Do you think that singing flamenco has ever help you personally?

Yes, a lot. It's given me confidence, and happiness, I can wind out when I've had any problem. Singing renews me inside, it feels like my cells are being renewed. It's regenerating, it makes me feel alive, and when I'm on stage I enjoy it to the maximum.

When I sing in public I try to make others feel how much I am enjoying it so that others can also feel that adrenaline and sense of renewal and well being when they listen to something that they are enjoying.

Do you feel that there is anything specific to flamenco singing with regards to emotional expression?

Yes. Flamenco singing is pure feeling. Depends on what palos you sing you get different emotions, some are happier, like tangos, alegrias and bulerias, that were performed by our ancestors to celebrate popular parties. But the mine singing, the seguidilla, the soleá, it's about suffering and difficulties that people had to go through in a tough area. It's a very special kind of singing, with lots of suffering and it comes from a very deep place inside one. They express how people could cope with the everyday hardness, how people used to live in the past. That was the way they used to express it, by singing.

If I tell you singing and health, what comes to your mind?

If you sing, your mood improves, you can really become happier and you get closer to an authentic state of health.

What are your projects for the future? What do you aim for?

What I really want is to sing and to be in a stage and share music with people, an audience to enjoy with me. That's what I always want to do, with disregard of the fact if I record a disc or I become famous and all that fantasies, but my biggest wish is to sing... I am already fulfilling it!

 A lovely night in front of the medieval arabic castle of the city, that ended with a walk in the warm andalusian night. I highly reccomend Lidia Plaza and her ensemble for performances in UK.

SEE VIDEO

SINGING WITH NO WORDS

Singing in harmony is lovely... but so it is playing with sound. To allow ourselves to stop and listen to the sound of the voices that are together, not worrying about being or not in a particular "tune", and being able to pay attention to this cluster of sounds, and understand that it's also a material that can be explored and it's bound to be a fantastic experience.

I have many times been approached by people who love singing, and from whom singing in a group is a very meaningful experience. There are others who might enjoy to sit and listen, but won't say they like to sing. When asked, the reply is variations of:

- I don't like it because I don't do it well

So the more self-conscious one is, the most likely to not enjoy singing if they are aware that they cannot follow a tune. But we did various experiments. Last December, at Kingston Centre for Independent Living, I offered a session with both people who enjoed singing and people who didn't like singing. I said that nobody should do anything they did not feel like, and started to create a group dynamic and some fun warm up exercises. No need to leave your chair, no need to sing. But we started to produce sound, and do play and paint with our sounds in the air.

In less than 20 minutes we had a joyful circle of improvisers, who where happily participating in a common musical piece, each one at their own pace, with their own contributions. Those not so comfortable with tune, could do percussion sounds... or atonal melodies that where integrated in the whole circle that was becoming more and more happy!

Needless to say that those who "don't like singing" had a great time too. :)

We did a similar experience at Leith Hill for the challenge event that Heritage2Health took there last October 2013. In this case it was people with learning difficulties, their friends, carers and families. And again we played with sound, using some techniques that have been used by free improvisers and contemporary composers. One discovery was to find out that sometimes people with LD where much more outgoing and daring to produce much more kinds of different sounds, that the people with no LD, so in this situation the edges between disabled and not disabled where very much merging. People who didn't have LD but where much more self conscious, would need more time before they are ready to produce a variety of sounds without becoming very critical with themselves. Finally everybody bind together in sound production without many worries about how they should call the experience.

But people who is familiar with the work of Evan Parker, Fred Frith, John Cage, Morton Feldman, John Zorn, Eddie Prevost, Keith Tippet would identify this kind of approach to voice and sound. And those who don't... it was pure joy and enjoyment on the freedom of the voice and the body! 

I came back home on the copilot seat, relieving the scene in my mind and thinking on the enormous possibilities that playing with sounds can have to make us feel non judgamental, at ease with our voices and bodies, and free.

Looking forward to more.

ARE YOU IN TOUCH?

There is something that struck me since I have been conducting choirs here in UK. That is the fact that some people gave me, amongst other kinds of positive and most interesting feedback, comments about “surprising” and “unusual” pedagogy. They were referring to touch.

I remember that around when I was first starting my voice studies, my teachers would make take my hand over his upper belly and breath, so that I could “understand” what was happening with the air. I have never been a very touchy person, but I understood that by feeling other's people's abdomen I would have a most clear picture of what they where actually doing that if it was just explained with words. And when my last singing teacher, the wonderful Esperanza Abad wanted to explain me her way to understand “three dimensional breathing” she has making me feel in my hands how she was doing it, and that one of the most interesting and revealing sessions about breathing that I ever had.

Later on, in my time being a student first in UK, there was so much to do about touch! And even if socially I am not the touchiest person in this world, I learned that was good for me for many reasons. Not only I could be able to understand better if I touch, what other people is doing with their bodies, but also touch is important with regards to emotional expression, and by touch we can learn to help others relax and communicate so many things. And not just that, there are significant health benefits around physical contact and a lot has been written about it.

Touch can help others to feel supported, to calm down, to connect with others, and from a technical point of view, to understand quicker what another body is doing. So sometimes in our warm ups we include some gentle touch on the shoulders of the person at your side, or hold hands in a circle, or if I am explaining about how does the diaphragm lower and make space in your body all around (including the kidney area) it works very well to let a student put their palm over my kidney area while I breath and then sing. It can save me hours of explaining!

Of course, this would never mean you are to invade the personal space of the others (I am the first one who does not like to be touched randomly by people for no reason), or touch people without realizing if they are or not comfortable with it, but whilst I must say I never got anyone unhappy about it, my surprise was that some people found it surprising.

- But is it okay for you?

- Oh, yes, it's fine... I was just surprised about it because I never did this before.

- But should I stop doing it?

- Please, don't!

So I do use touch in my sessions. 

It surprised me as much as surprised others, that they found it “surprising” and wonder how much policies have changed in the last twenty years in England. I left UK in 2004 to teach in Madrid, and now when I am back it looks like things I used to do and learned here are not so often happening due to policies.

- You should write a document saying that your choir workshops can include touch, and get people to agree with it and sign it. -I was once told.

And I will do if it it's necessary but wonder what has happened in the years I've been away. I was surprised to find that some people thought that my surprising methods are due to a cultural difference (I am Spanish), and I smile while I remember that it was in England were I learned about physical contact and emotional release.

And I totally understand that institutions must have

a way to prosecute abusers and prevent abuse. But wonder if preventing physical contact can be somehow alienating at times. And I was surprised to hear that a yoga teacher told me he never touches anybody, so if a posture needs to be corrected he can only do it with words and explanations, or demonstrations. And I wonder if this is natural. And I know it's not.

So I will keep doing my job the best I can, and appreciating all the lovely people that gives me feedback, that keep coming to my “surprising” sessions and decide that they actually like them, whist I'm sure other professionals share these values too here in England too.

And I thank the comments that “inform” me about the fact that I should take on board new policies that didn't exist 20 years ago, so that I can be aware and try to work gently with everybody so that it will never be abrupt, but actually reinforce trust in others and in ourselves, as touch is a way of very meaningful expression that reaches were words cannot reach.

I leave you an interesting talk by Dacher Keltner on Touch. He is an UC Berkeley psychology professor and faculty director of the Greater Good Science Center, shares his insights from the new science of touch: compassionate communication, touch therapies, and proof that "to touch is to give life."

Further reading:

http://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/hands_on_research

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/23/health/23mind.html?_r=0

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wired-success/201209/why-have-we-lost-the-need-physical-touch

Browne, J. (2004). Early relationship environments: physiology of skin-to-skin contact for parents and their preterm infants. Clinics In Perinatology, 31(2): 287-98. Denison, B. (2004). Touch the pain away: new research on therapeutic touch and persons with fibromyalgia syndrome. Holistic Nursing Practice, 18(3): 142-51.

Geldard, F. A. (1960, May 27). Some neglected possibilities of commu-

nication.Science, 131,1583–1588

Hall, Edward T. The silent language, Anchor Books, New York 1973.

Hertenstein, M. J., Holmes, R., McCullough, M., & Keltner, D. (2009). The communication of emotion via touch. Emotion, 9, 566-573.

Hertenstein, M. J., Keltner, D., App, B., Bulleit, B. A., Jaskolka, A. R. (2006). Touch communicates distinct emotions. Emotion, 6, 528-533.

Montagu, A. Touching: Human Significance of the Skin. 1971, New York: Harper & Row

Weze, C., et al. (2005). Evaluation of healing by gentle touch. Public Health, 119(1): 3-10. Wood, D., Craven, R., & Whitney, J. (2005). The effect of therapeutic touch on behavioural symptoms of persons with dementia. Alternative Therapies In Health And Medicine, 11(1): 66-74.

SING FOR YOUR HEART NEXT DECEMBER

We have received a lovely invitation to contribute to "Sing for Your Heart", an initiative from Heart Research UK, that we think we should share with you.

A Sing for Your Heart event encourages choirs, singers and people alike all over the country to sing, whether in a train station, bus station or at home on the karaoke to raise money for Heart Research UK. Choirs and singers can sign up to sing at one of our organised city venues, but they also want to encourage everyone to set up their own events and sing to raise money for them.  Not only is singing a great way to raise money, research has shown that it's also good for your heart. It has been proven that singing not only warms the hearts of so many people all over the world but research shows that singing is also good for the heart.

There are many ways in which you can help from planning your own Sing for your Heart event to supporting one of our Sing for your Heart events by volunteering to collect for a couple of hours or recruiting you local choir, music group, singers to perform or why not go the extra mile and coordinate one of our events. 

If you require further information or fundraising support please contact Claire in the fundraising team on community@heartresearch.org.uk or call 0113 297 6212.

More information at  http://heartresearch.org.uk/fundraising/sing-your-heart

HOW DO WE WANT OUR CHOIRS (The Singing4Health approach)

We want our choirs to be inclusive.- a choir for everybody who wants to join regardless of how people consider that they can sing or not. Even people who consider themselves to be “tone deaf” has proved considerable improvement with practice, relaxation, enjoyment and lack of judgement. I even had students in the past who said “they couldn't sing” and ended up a three year period being able to sing solos from musical comedies in front of an audience! Never underestimate your skills.

A workshop in a lovely place, Leith Hill. For Heritage2Health.

We want our choirs to be embracing- a group that at the same time that they do musical and body training, are working towards community building and socializing with the others. This process is as important as any final concert, performance or presentation; what is happening inside the choir, that is a matter of days and weeks and months of collective practice. We become inclusive when we are able to recognize and accept everybody with disregards of their “apparent” skills. And I say apparent meaning that many people join choirs thinking they can do less of what they can really do, and on the other hand, there are skills that sometimes remain unnoticed in a first instance that mean a lot to a group, and they are not always related to singing: patience, empathy and not being judgemental are some of them. People who naturally stand out in this are a real treasure for any group, as positive attitudes are contagious!

We want our choirs to be a safe place where to express ourselves- to be able to balance what as choir singers when sometimes need to give in, in favour of a group sound, so may be our way of singing in a choir won't be exactly the same as our solo singing. At the same time we enjoy and give the opportunity to create spaces where individual expression is supported by the group and each member is given it's time and opportunity to make their own individual contribution to the richness and variety of the whole.

Where we are all on the same boat.
Are we ready to become in our choir the difference that we want for the world?

  ©2014 Maria Soriano

PRIMAL SINGING AS WORKSHOPS FOR WELL BEING (III)

It was then when I was offered the opportunity to do my first workshops in Primal Singing. As before, I started in Yoga centres, offering this technique as 'mindful singing', and getting a wonderful group of people willing to sing and express themselves. I taught at the Yavanna Centre and at the Allegro Spacio, both in Madrid. 

We would do mainly Primal Singing, but also often followed by short songs of students' own choosing. And it was clearly the intense Primal Singing sessions that provided the essential groundwork for students to then be able to meaningfully sing their own songs. 

 Thus I remember how workshop attendees, once attuned to a state of mind that will lead to it, would choose a meaningful song for them and work their emotions over it. The woman who had been forbidden to sing from the age of 12, for example, who now came for a singing lesson in her 60s, and chose a children's song she always loved, through which she got in touch with so many feelings almost forgotten consciously. Or the stiff dancer who chose a song of the loss of youthful innocence, whose muscles relaxed in resonance with her singing that connected her with those primary emotions. 

Such were the incredibly powerful experiences that gave me the assurance and confidence to know that I wanted to develop the Primal Singing method further.

Later on, it was time to move out of my 'comfort zone', and I started to offer it as 'emotional improvisation as a tool in modern singing didactics' for students of voice, particularly at Escuela de Musica Creativa, the largest private music school in Madrid. You can see, published below, a typical example of a workshop in Primal Singing that took place in Madrid in 2007.

For a vivid short summary of what Primal Singing can do for people, I would recommend you watch the following video:

'Before and after Emotional Work session'

During these years, I persevered with my experimental work, observing body expression and body changes as Primal discourse takes place, observing how audiences and participants react to it and would find in it a channel for self expression they didn't have before, or they didn't realize they had. 

I recognised that the health-related aspect of my Primal Singing practice had been growing more salient and more obvious in light both of my own lived experiences, reactions, and personal transformation and of those of participants in my workshops.

© Maria Soriano 2014

PRIMAL SINGING (II)... FROM PARTICIPATION TO PERFORMANCE

It seemed natural to me at that time, as a performing artist, that the next step was to performe Primal Singing in public. After the personal experience and its achievements, I started to do performances in Primal Singing, in the first instance in small venues such as yoga centres, where I offered a theoretical introduction to what Primal Singing was about, followed by a demonstration of it. I also travelled to Lalita, a retreat in the depths of Extremadura's countryside, to deliver demonstrations, and my demonstrations started to become more participative, such that by the end of them the audience would have the chance to choose what emotions I was going to work on. 

This second stage, going public, was risky as one could not have predicted beforehand how the audience would respond to it; but at the same time these were very exciting times. I got a great deal of feedback from a variety of audiences who had not necessarily been exposed to contemporary music before then. In most of the cases something very interesting came out of it: if you authentically feel the feeling, it resonates with the audience irrespective of the form, structure, or modality that the music takes. Is that perhaps what some contemporary music was sometimes lacking, and why it was hard to engage audiences with it? Over recent decades a lot of very complex music has been written that demands a great deal of intellectual and physical effort to produce with exactitude, and yet perhaps at the cost of feeling being lost … But I couldn’t find other people who were following this path I had chosen, so I went on performing and asking for feedback from my audiences.

I graduated from smaller to more major venues. I performed Primal Singing for University Felipe II (Aranjuez-Madrid) in front of a large audience who for the most part did not have any background in listening to atonal music. The result was very much the same: people engaged with it when there was emotion, and improvisation was a huge enhancer of those emotions and the engagement with the audiences.

Contemporary musician and composer Francis Garcia had the opportunity to listen to one of my experimental performances of Primal Singing, and proposed that he collaborate with me and integrate virtual synthesisers in my performances. Voice and synthesisers became a stable duo, performing under the name Punto Zero. It was clear to us that Primal Singing had a cathartic effect and the potential to release people and emotions. We reflected this idea in short videos entitled Primal Elements and Primal Catharsis,  under the direction of Gui Campos.

More experiments took place, and modes of interaction explored, some reacting to touch, as at minute 2.30 of the video 'Hace faltaser...', for example, in which I am blindfolded and take my cue for vocalisation solely from and in response to my arm being manipulated by a workshop participant.

Francis and I started to meet regularly to explore sound, emotion and improvisation together, and ended up producing several shows that were taken into the theatre.

A recommended illustrative video of such a performance is published online as 'Punto Cero: Primal Elements'.

That was, I would say, the culmination of this second stage of the development of Primal Singing, in which I felt confident to perform in front of an audience, and sufficiently well trained to have the necessary awareness for engaging with the audience and at the same time to 'let flow' with no fear, emotions and aesthetic fleeting impressions provoked in and by the very moment itself. Primal Singing became very much 'singing the moment'.

By this time I felt confident in delivering Primal Singing in front of an audience, but much more was yet to come.