Foreword
(please note: This is a very rough translation done by myself with the help of deepl.com. It is very likely that you find peculiarities and mistakes. I am happy to receive proposals for corrections and changes into something closer to proper English!)
When voice began to move into the centre of my life in the early 1990s, it met philosophy, which had resided there relatively unchallenged for some years. The first contacts between the two fields were not all friendly. In the active engagement with my own voice, I had found something that was obviously missing in philosophy and that I had been searching for more or less without any orientation in the years before. Singing allowed me a fuller and stronger connection to my body and my inner situation than I would ever have perceived in thinking about life, the world and myself. The discovery of my voice remedied a deficiency I had vaguely felt before, without being able to put it into words. In the first phase of exploring my voice, it seemed as if I had to choose between philosophy and voice. Both asserted a claim to sole representation in my inner world and peaceful co-existence was not in sight.
But it didn't take me very long to realise that thinking and singing need not be competing activities. And I began to look more intensively at the approach of voice development, which ultimately brought me to the voice as a life theme. This voice approach is associated with the names Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart. Soon it became clear how much the mental concepts help to determine what my voice can show of itself. Many limitations of the vocal field have their origin in an idea of what my voice can and cannot do. Freeing the voice from limitations always goes hand in hand with redefining one's own concepts.
There were good reasons to intertwine voice and thinking and to make the voice the subject of my philosophy. On the active side, the intertwining of the vocal research journey with thinking about conceptual foundations and the question of new ways of thinking voice led into an increased turn towards art. And art became the third moment that moved into a room in the imaginary shared apartment at the centre of my life. As it is often the way in flat-sharing communities, major disputes could not be avoided. All three areas tend to take up a lot of space. But surprisingly, the shared apartment has lasted until today.
Voice, philosophy and art. Singing, thinking, creating. Just about everything I have brought into the world in the past decades - on paper, on various stages and in rehearsal and seminar rooms - owes much to the cooperative potential of this triad.
The texts gathered here naturally belong to the part of my work where thinking takes the lead. In terms of content, all three areas are addressed:
- the fundamental thinking about the human voice or vocal action and its anthropological significance,
- the big question of how voice development processes can be accompanied, and
- the theme of a vocal art that is based on the liberated voice with all its possibilities.
The breadth of the thematic spectrum has also produced stylistic differences in the texts. There are very philosophically coloured essays and others written with a rather light hand. There are long explorations and smaller interjections, general observations and very concrete reflections.
Accordingly, I invite you, the reader, to arrange the order of reading according to your own preferences. Although the order is not entirely random, there is no need to start with the first text and work your way through from beginning to end. The inner connection of the various reflections should also become apparent in a free reading.
Some of these texts have already been published elsewhere, others were originally lecture manuscripts and one or two have appeared on one of my blogs in earlier versions.
Despite my connection to the Wolfsohn/Hart line of voice liberation tradition, I believe and hope that my reflections will also be stimulating for people who have come to engage with the voice through whatever means. I do not claim to speak for the entire diverse scene that invokes the approach of Wolfsohn/Hart. Rather, with this book I have arrived at what might be called an approach of my own. I continue to stand on the foundation of the ideas of Alfred Wolfsohn and Roy Hart - or the version of my teachers from this context. But the special constellation in which voice, art and thinking show up in me have led to practical and theoretical consequences that do not necessarily result from the Roy Hart work. For me, this book marks the end of a stage in the research journey.
Although further developments of my thinking are likely, I have the feeling that I will not fall back behind this own approach.
Many of the thoughts presented here have emerged and been clarified in conversation and practical work with people I have been privileged to meet on my vocal path so far. These include the members of the ensemble KörperSchafftKlang and the stimmfeld-Verein, i.e. the two formations in which voice work mainly manifests itself in my life environment. I have to thank them for that! Fortunately, there was and is always a lively exchange of experiences and ideas in my seminars and teaching programmes, which has a great influence on my theoretical work.
My special thanks go to Bettina Hesse for her patient support, which has gone far beyond stylistic editing (of the German version), Karin Leyk for the proven wonderful design of the cover and Angelika Kudella for the equally proven professional typesetting (of the original book).
I would like to thank Agnes Pollner for everything and for accompanying practically every text published here in its development and for reading and critically commenting on earlier versions.
I would like to dedicate the book to the memory of two people: Marita Günther and Sheila Braggins. Both were close confidants and long-time students of Alfred Wolfsohn. They not only gave me an insight into the life and work of the founder of our voice development that was authentic in the best sense of the word and paved the way for me to bring voice and philosophy together in my work, but beyond that, with their great personalities, they bore witness to the fact that our tradition of voice development is never just about the question of how I sing, but that behind it lies the crucial question: How do I live?
Cologne/Köln, June 2020/Sept. 2023
P.S.: Information about my work with the voice can be found on the internet at http://stimmfeld.de/. There are also links to my various blogs. My little internet shop is at http://hoerfeld.de/. You can find information about the activities of the stimmfeld association and the ensemble KörperSchafftKlang at http://stimmfeld-verein.de/.
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