Yesterday, a friend called me. She was in tears. Having a very hard time. Mostly about her relationship with music.
From the outside, she seemed to be kicking ass: teaching singing to adults and children, doing it rather well, and getting paid for it.
But on the inside, she was filled with doubt and criticism and jealousy. Her resume and schedule and tax return all screamed “expert singer” — but she had fallen out of the habit of singing for herself. She had backed into a creative and spiritual dead-end.
This happens all the time to working artists. We all know the feeling. Given how sparse the weekly SSS playlists have grown in recent weeks, perhaps you can empathize, dear singers?
So this week — let’s give in to our internal resistance. Let’s have the courage to honor the side of us that is afraid to make noise, to be judged, or simply to be heard. The part of us that finds all kinds of reasons — conscious and unconscious, reasonable and unreasonable — not to sing.
Let’s give that resistance voice!
Option A. Sing your resistance — using whatever melodies, rhythms, words or syllables feel right. You’ve spent so much time feeling it by now — what do you have to lose by letting it out into the air?
Option B. No singing required — If your prefer, you can just speak about your resistance, in plain English, and record that for us. Or you can just post a sentence or two about your #1 block, the main thing that keeps you from singing, to the Facebook group.
To Contribute
The steps are as follows:
- Step 0: Sign up for a free SoundCloud account here. Join the SSS group.
- Step 1: Record yourself singing.
- Step 2: Upload to SoundCloud and post the track to the SSS group.
- Step 3: Listen to and comment on tracks uploaded by your fellow singers. (Play nice!)
Deadline: Your tracks should be uploaded by midnight wherever you are on Monday, Jan 11, 2016.
Length: The length of your finished work should be about the time it takes not to sing the thing you sang.
Description: It would be awesome to include a short description of where and when you sang your piece.
Title/Tag: When uploading to SoundCloud, put “[sss-block]” in the title of your track. Also include the term “sss-block” as a tag. This will help us find it.
Group: Once the track is uploaded, click on the “Add to group” button below the waveform and make sure to select the Society for Spontaneous Singing group. (This option will only appear if you have already joined the group! So do that now.)
Linking: You are welcome to include this info in your description:
This track is a reply to “SSS Prompt 50: Sing Your Block.” More on the Society for Spontaneous Singing at http://singthis.org .
Thank you, sweet singers!
Yours,
Jascha & Amado