Breathing life into music
It’s something we all do and, on the whole, take for granted, but Tom Service reconsiders how breathing is the essential basis of so much creativity in music
We do it on average 17,000 times a day, a rhythm of inspiration and exhalation that not only defines our physical existences but is also a fundamental arc of tension and release that gives life to our music: our breathing.
It’s not just singers, brass and woodwind players who are in obvious thrall to its power. Breathing, as a metaphor and a fact of our bodies’ biochemistry, sustains whole operas and symphonies, and it’s essential to the sounds that string instruments and keyboards make. If a performance of a violin partita or a piano sonata doesn’t ‘breathe’, if it doesn’t follow the rise and fall of our breathing, it’s not going to move us in the audience.
Composers and musicians have taken the shape of our breath as an essential structural and expressive shape. The flautist Kathryn Williams has created the project Coming Up For Air, in which composers write pieces that last as long as a single in-and-out breath. The results are scintillatingly diverse, from the wild distortion of Cee Haines’s DOOO to the swannee-whistle-fluidity of Andy Ingamells’s Aquafifer.
Miracles of breath are the stock-intrade of what our favourite operatic singers do: listening to Cecilia Bartoli or Jessye Norman spin their gravitydefying lines in Porpora or Wagner is something that takes our breath away in the audience, as they transfigure the limits of the brute biology of human breathing into lyrical transcendence.
Yet for truly breath-defying physical
Composers have taken the shape of our breath as an essential structural shape
extremity, it’s the technique of ‘circular breathing’ that truly makes you gasp in wonder. In 2017, the saxophonist Femi Kuti maintained a continuous sound on his instrument for 51 minutes and 38 seconds, a world record. The miracle of circular breathing makes it possible: storing air in his cheeks and pushing it into his instrument while simultaneously breathing fresh air through his nose, and repeating the cycle. It’s a stunning feat of coordination that virtuosos of all genres, from new music specialists to easylistening maestros like Kenny G, are using all the time in their performances, taking their breaths into the infinite.
But it’s not only when we’re surfing the limits of the possible in circular breaths or operatic extremity: the breath of the sounds we make is what makes our music human. The American composer Pauline Oliveros has a Sonic Meditation that proves the point: in Teach Yourself To Fly, by simply observing the patterns of our breathing we can achieve the illusion of flight, li ing o into another consciousness. Our breathing is the most mundane yet the most musically transcendent phenomenon we have as human beings. It’s the most essential connection to the bigger cycles of time that we’re all part of, the inspiration and exhalation of the tides, of lunar cycles, the ellipses of the solar system, the breath of the universe.
Tom Service explores how music works in The Listening Service on Sundays at 5pm