Why Voice #1

- a blog about voice philosophy and other voice related issues...
To start of in a grandiose fashion; None other than president Obama inspired me to start this blog about the philosophy of voice, how so you might ask? Because he himself has great gifts for rhetoric? Because he speaks so eloquently directly from his heart?
No, because he always talks about how "we the people" are connected by the commen denominator of wanting to do good in this world (by the way the cynic in me says that is not always true:-)
Anyway, after I had spent my day teaching some folks how to sing and speak, I thought, how does that make the world a better place? And well, I actually ended up thinking about this in such a way that it can only be thought of as philosophy.
Imagine for a second that you couldn't speak, some of you might have tried it due to a doctor ordering you to vocal rest for a periode of a few days, or laryngitis or some other short term voice loss circumstance - I myself did it for 10 days following my voice surgery in 2005. If that is a stretch and a little too hard to imagine, try imagining being in a foreign country unable to speak the language, it's almost the same - though chances are you can still make noises and eventually you will learn how to communicate dispite the language barrier, hell, you might even just learn the language:)
It's harder than one might think, right? Communication is hard without a voice, even harder without a voice that actually portraits how we think and feel, and without help from music or language. We maybe think that our voice is only used to express our individual thoughts and feelings, but anyone who has ever sung in a choir or joined in on the national anthem with a large group of people, or sat in a pew at church also knows, that it isn't just an individual communication device, it is also a community builder, our voice also connects us to the collective in a stronger fashion than any other.
So we know being able to use our voice is important....however, most us don't know how to, and I think my task as a member of "we the people" is to change that:-)
My wish is that we will move away from the right and wrong of voice and simply start talking about using it - the "I can't sing" or "I'm tone death" or "I don't know how to tell them how I feel" followed by "they don't understand me", will in my world where "we the people" live - disappear (again my inner cynic is shaking her head:-)
Using our voice, communication in all forms, takes practice. So lets start practicing.......
next on Why Voice?....follow here every Friday:)