Raise your voice in song
Remember Mama Cass singing? “Make your own kind of music. Sing your own special song. Make your own kind of music, Even if nobody else sings along.”
Singing has been a joy all my life. When the new music teacher asked me in Grade two if I would like to sing a solo in the music festival, I jumped at the chance. We practiced diligently. Somehow, a candle figured into this. The idea was to sing out so much air, it would blow out the candle.
This was not a problem for a girl who had spent happy hours singing stories into the windy end of Mum’s Electrolux. A person can sing loud and long using this kind of microphone – and, blessedly for others in the vicinity, the vacuum motor can drown any voice with its own roar! Happily, the teacher and I worked on diction and rhythm. Mum delighted in turning out a pretty little performance outfit for me and everyone who would listen was treated to “I Had a Little Nut Tree.”
However, alone on a stage that stretched to forever, the people I wanted to sing for were too far away. I think I stopped breathing. All except the boards directly in front of me swam in blurred swirls of grey.
Through my practiced lips fell the song lyric, word tumbling after word, each collapsing with all the weight of a snowflake on the boards at my feet. Not a single perfectly enunciated syllable escaped beyond the apron. How the adjudicator was able to ramble on at such great length remains a mystery. Perhaps he was practiced at giving bad news to voiceless little wannabe singers. I was never encouraged to sing solo again.
Not that that stopped me from singing – in choirs and choruses, at campfires, with my students, for and with my own children. There’s so much to sing, isn’t there? Nursery rhymes. Rounds. Hymns. Folk songs. Popular songs. Nonsense. And every few years there is new research to show how very beneficial any kind of singing is.*
Those old teachers who started the school day off with a round of songs were wise! Turns out, whether you enjoy the exercise or not, whether the sound you produce is lilting or a spasm, singing (especially with other people) improves heart health and invigorates the immune system. What researchers are finding now is that singing soothes the nerves (by somehow causing the body to release hormones—endorphins—which are associated with pleasure) and tones down stress and anxiety (as the body receives oxytocin, a hormone linked to trust and bonding, and reduces the output of cortisol, a stress hormone.)
When you think about it, singing is a nice way to measure a life. “Her life spanned one million and seventy hundred songs,” sounds better than an account of years to me. “Her life was one long song,” would be a great epitaph.
* http://www.bpsmedicine.com/content/8/1/11