This year marks the 7th year since I started my journey learning singing. Or rather re-learning. Singing is innate, so however we sing later on, good or bad will be a mirror of all the conditioning we went through all our lives. Like a chocolate with a centre, that is going through different stages until it’s not exactly how it looked earlier, we gather and cover the core with all kinds of beautiful, nasty, horrid or strange habits that manifest through our voice. Our face, our bodies are easy to judge quickly. We might show impression in the first three seconds and later fade out in front of others. And here comes the voice. It will impress and keep impressing with tones, velocity, melodic or parodical patterns and all exquisite qualities during a conversation or seminar. It’s easy to make a mask, put a makeup and be beautiful. What about voice? It is unmaskable. It is a quality of you that you think is yours and the way your hear it, until you record yourself and hear a different thing. Until someone comments how beautiful or ugly it sounds. In a way, our voice is already a mask. The word “persona” means “to sound through” (per sonare). That goes back to actors in Roman theater who would wear masks and pronounce terrifying sounds throughout the music, often bringing the audience into a catharsis. That was the role of the Roman theater. The theater and music was not intended to be entertaining as it is today. It meant to release the accumulated energy, and bring us into tears. Joyful or sad, in the end when we cry and we clean our souls. And this is the moment of beautiful void, when we are empty, to receive again and to give something out of this nothing.
“We come into the world crying. And when we die, others cry for us. In between the two we must cry and cry, to wash ourselves in tears, to purify ourselves.” says Makhmalbaf in his film “Salaam Cinema”. I want to be pure. And to reach that purity, my intuition says, I have to first clean my voice, so I see its raw beauty.