CONTROL………….
One of the main problems confronting the student is that all great teachers, singers and thinkers about the subject tell us that the magical element of the unknown is crucial to good performing. It is about understanding that singing is not about control but rather that which lies beyond control…….
Whatever you can do, or dream you can do, begin it. Boldness has genius and power and magic within it. He who loses his being in order to become, lives for ever.
When imprisoned in unspeakable conditions as a hostage in the Middle East, Brian Keenan the Irish writer wrote this………..
A noise that I have never heard before, nor since, nor do I ever want to hear it again. I know only that it came from me, yet it did not come from me. It was a cry so awful and so excruciating which came from some part of mc, but was not willed by me. It was a primordial sound fusing every moment of anguish in mc. Where it came from I don’t know, only that I was the vehicle through which it passed……….
Images can go deeper than calculated knowledge (Bruce Chatwin)
Bruce Chatwin writes in Songlines, 'Has the ‘gift of tongues’ (language) somehow done away with instinct? Is man in short the proverbial blank slate of the behaviourists, infinitely malleable, adaptive? If so, all the great teachers have been spouting hot air'………….real teaching is therefore something else. The voice, a flame to be kindled, not a mechanism or ideology to be created. Two ways of learning, two attitudes to living. Control or freedom. Imposition or listening.
Luis Bunuel, the film director, said 'I will die for a man who says he seeks the truth. I will kill the man who says he’s found it.'
A friend of mine, a surgeon, told me that he opened up a patient recently to discover the appendix, according to the textbooks, in quite the wrong place. Never mind. It was working well.
The human spirit is a flame to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled (Eleanor Roosevelt)
Towards the end of his journey, the ‘dervish’ becomes the ‘way’ not the ‘wayfarer’; he becomes a ‘place’ over which something is passing. not a traveller following his own free will (Kashf-al Mahjub )
You cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself (Gautama Buddha)
Technique is the means to a beginning (Margot Fonteyn)
When imprisoned in unspeakable conditions as a hostage in the Middle East, Brian Keenan the Irish writer wrote this………..
A noise that I have never heard before, nor since, nor do I ever want to hear it again. I know only that it came from me, yet it did not come from me. It was a cry so awful and so excruciating which came from some part of mc, but was not willed by me. It was a primordial sound fusing every moment of anguish in mc. Where it came from I don’t know, only that I was the vehicle through which it passed……….
Images can go deeper than calculated knowledge (Bruce Chatwin)
Bruce Chatwin writes in Songlines, 'Has the ‘gift of tongues’ (language) somehow done away with instinct? Is man in short the proverbial blank slate of the behaviourists, infinitely malleable, adaptive? If so, all the great teachers have been spouting hot air'………….real teaching is therefore something else. The voice, a flame to be kindled, not a mechanism or ideology to be created. Two ways of learning, two attitudes to living. Control or freedom. Imposition or listening.
Luis Bunuel, the film director, said 'I will die for a man who says he seeks the truth. I will kill the man who says he’s found it.'
A friend of mine, a surgeon, told me that he opened up a patient recently to discover the appendix, according to the textbooks, in quite the wrong place. Never mind. It was working well.
The human spirit is a flame to be kindled, not a vessel to be filled (Eleanor Roosevelt)
Towards the end of his journey, the ‘dervish’ becomes the ‘way’ not the ‘wayfarer’; he becomes a ‘place’ over which something is passing. not a traveller following his own free will (Kashf-
You cannot travel on the path before you have become the path itself (Gautama Buddha)
Technique is the means to a beginning (Margot Fonteyn)
