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Or doesn’t.
It’s a moment in our lives that has destroyed our musical confidence, let alone our self-confidence. The disdain on our teacher’s face as they say we are not good enough; that we can’t hold that lightest of things, a tune.
It doesn’t have to be like that (news flash — it never did) and thank heavens teachers nowadays have a humane, inclusive approach to choir participation. Because the fact is, being able to physically reproduce a sound we have heard, with a part of our body we cannot see, is a phenomenally complex action; it’s a miracle that anyone can do it without instruction. And those who cannot do it automatically are not stupid and we are not tone deaf. We simply need to learn how. And in the case of voices dropping, sometimes we need to learn how twice.
It’s something I have become intimate with over the last couple of years as my voice has dropped with gender transition and testosterone (made in Switzerland, thanks very much). I used to be able to replicate any note (well, within a rather dusky contralto), but after a few months of Swiss T I discovered a new inability to even get close to a note. I was lost in an aural wilderness, scrabbling around in atonal chaos. I usually sing a lot in cello and viola lessons, but I stopped, made like a bee and hummed instead. I had to go to a string teachers' conference where we all sang together. The teachers in front of me turned around in horror to see who was the “tone deaf” person wrecking their musical moment with reluctant caterwauling.
This was an emergency (oh ok, not, but at least a code orange). I had had a student in Kabul, Mehmet, who also couldn’t find his pitch. Together we had worked on vocally sliding up or down, so he could learn how to manipulate his vocal chords. It seemed to have some effect, so every time I went out for a motorbike ride I did the same. The strangest noises came from under my helmet as I rode along, performing vocal rehab at eighty kilometres an hour.
Bit by bit, my aural compass came back, and if it did for me it can for you. If you were one of the kids whose shoulder wasn’t tapped by your music teacher, if you were left feeling a little unloved, a little less than capable, you know now that it isn’t anything to do with your own success or failure, it is simply a case of being taught a skill.
These days my voice still isn’t quite right; I still slide around until I find the note, but once I get there I can sing quite nicely. Husky and quiet, but satisfactory. I sing along to anything — Elton John, Beethoven, Joni Mitchell (twenty octaves lower), Johann Strauss. But it’s made me think about our voices and how they define us — the bold-voiced amongst us, and how they tend to get what they want over the meeker-sounding. And how if we can speak up or sing out, we can stand up for ourselves in the tumult of this precarious life. And I think about our other voices, our instruments, and how they can help us speak. And how, if they are the right ones for us, in the words of Mia my eight-year-old viola student, we can let our hearts sing.
Ed Ayres presents Weekend Breakfast on ABC Classic (Saturday and Sunday 6am – 9am).