(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! Most of the footnotes that you will find in the original book are left out in this text. If you want to know more in detail about the quoted texts and authors please get in contact with me!)
On the Immanent Power
of the Imperfect in the Art of the Voice
The concept of the human voice, which I have adapted from Alfred Wolfsohn, was revolutionary in some respects in its time. Wolfsohn paved the way for the anthropological and psychological consideration of the voice and made this approach the basis of practical voice development. And he created the conditions for a vocal art that acts with the whole voice instead of assigning each individual to only one register, as is customary in classical singing. But despite all his innovations, in the first decades of his work Wolfsohn still moved within the framework of European classical music, which he only wanted to expand significantly – towards singing voices with a range that encompassed all vocal registers. Wolfsohn remained true to the classical ideal in one respect: during training, singers should be enabled to handle all the possibilities of the voice with confidence. Despite all the fundamental differences in the understanding of the human voice and in the methodology of its training, Wolfsohn adopts the classical idea of a professional singing voice, which focuses on sovereignty and less on freedom.
What could be wrong with that, one might object. It is precisely in this process that the term training is used. Why should one doubt this?
I would like to propose an alternative to this kind of training. Or rather a supplement, because as an artist as well as a voice teacher, I am interested in good training, but often, if not always, take different paths in doing so.
The "immanent power of the imperfect" mentioned in the title describes the proposal quite accurately. It is no invention of me, but implicit in Wolfsohn's logic of voice and recurs in hints and in practical work, especially with Roy Hart.
In order to arrive at a formulation of this alternative, one must take one of Wolfsohn's central attitudes more seriously than he seems to have taken it himself. For him, the training of the voice does not follow an ideal, however developed, which is to be achieved, but is oriented exclusively towards the individual voice of the person who is standing there in front of the teacher. The teacher only has to listen to the possibilities for development that are announced in the voice and - perhaps earlier than the students themselves - to notice when these new sound spaces appear.
These indications are often enough expressed in sound qualities that in a conventional lesson would be qualified as difficulties, imprecision or sounds foreign to singing. Here, however, unexpected new sound possibilities often open up. On the one hand, the problematic vocal sounds always lead to completely new sound ranges of the voice, which at the beginning are often not even recognised by the singers as belonging to their own voice. Moreover, these false and unattractive sounds are themselves highly interesting from an artistic point of view! If one frees oneself from the usual value judgements and listens to the sound of the voice without prejudice and with curiosity, sound spaces open up in which aspects of the human condition can be heard. They may not be beautiful in the classical sense, but they represent a promising artistic material. Moreover, the more one succeeds in consciously dealing with these difficult vocal sounds, the easier it becomes to vocally choose tonal alternatives. The flexibility of the voice grows with the tonal scope that is available to it. It is not a question of excluding the realm of beautiful singing. Rather, the goal is an expansion of the vocal field that is oriented towards the voice and not towards vocal ideals. This is accompanied by a deepening of the contact between the singer and his/her voice.
In other words, in this kind of voice training, the ideal is not the voice trained for beauty or even for pure vocal range. It is more important to train one's own hearing in such a way that all emerging sounds, whether beautiful or problematic, are recognised as potential artistic material. The next step is then to acquire these vocal sounds in such a way that one can deal with them confidently. Sovereignty therefore also plays a role in this concept, albeit a different one than in classical voice lessons. Strictly speaking, it is only an intermediate step on the way to freedom of the voice. The integration of sound areas into my vocal field takes place at the end in order to open up these possibilities for the voice and to give it the freedom to move there. It is not me who deals freely with my voice, but the voice gains the space to move freely - also from me and my concepts.
We do not want to free the voice from its so-called difficulties, but to make the sound ranges experienced as difficult an integral, available part of the voice. Such trained voices do not always correspond to classical ideals of beauty. Their beauty will be a very individual one from the beginning, for which one needs open and free ears to enjoy it!
I have made a conceptual proposal for the training of a free voice in this sense with my training programme. In addition, for the development of the extended voice, the confrontation with other voices and their possibilities is helpful and instructive. In other voices you can experience aspects of sound that have not yet been discovered in your own. This is especially true for the great voice artists of the extended voice. However, their possibilities are too far away at the beginning of an individual voice development to integrate their example directly into one's own voice. It is never a question of a one-to-one imitation, but of the transformation of vocal sounds that lend themselves to one's own voice. In the confrontation with voices that are on the path of a common voice development - for example in seminars - surprising discoveries can also be made, with which one can expand one's own horizon of vocal possibilities. Experienced singers of all backgrounds often discover astonishing new aspects in beginners!
Finally, I would like to make a few remarks about the importance of the imperfect in artistic processes with the voice. One can only say something about this to a very limited extent, because the real information is to be found in the performances and not in the description of the artistic events. The development and artistic appropriation of the extended voice is also an entirely individual path. This is what makes it so interesting and invites general thoughts only as a stimulus for one's own search.
The power of the imperfect is most likely to find a space when levels of unpredictability are drawn into the vocal processes. They contain the demand to react vocally and flexibly to situations as they arise. If one succeeds in using the open-ended risk space and following the power of the imperfect, such a vocal performance can succeed. It is not about a technical level of voice mastery, but about a trained ear that allows one to deal artistically with the current possibilities of the voice. The artistically virtuoso mastery of the voice is, however, at the same time a condition for making comprehensive use of what the Extended Voice has to offer. This becomes particularly clear when working in vocal border areas. The limits can be found in the parameter of pitch as well as in unusual ranges of timbre, which are sometimes commonly associated with vocal problems. With great awareness of one's own voice, it can be possible to bring freedom even into these fields and thus open up the space for the unpredictable. Unpredictability can also be invited through the aspect of time.
Long voice performances sometimes allow the voice to move away from learned habits and allow for movements that cannot be planned. Working with time offers the opportunity to follow the paths of the voice, and by using the immanent power of the imperfect, to achieve a very peculiar virtuosity.
This sounds like art in a late avant-garde space of experimentation. But the ideas underlying this approach to artistic work with the voice can already be found in Weimar Classicism: Friedrich Schiller said that beauty is freedom in appearance. This is also what the art of the voice is all about. For it is not perfection that leads to beauty, but the freedom that takes the risk of allowing the unpredictable.
In the correspondence between Goethe and Schiller, there is already a reflection on the unpredictable as a moment of the artistic process. Over time, Schiller learns an artistic attitude from Goethe that was still alien to the former at the beginning. Schiller is the poet as philosopher who strove for daylight knowledge and wanted to illuminate every dark corner that showed or hid itself from him. He could learn from Goethe that it is also important for the artist to leave the creative ground (my term!) in the dark so that he can become productive there. Too much brightness disturbs the creative force. This also applies to the Extended Voice. The immanent power of the imperfect develops in the dark. It needs dark corners in which something new can break through, free from the expectations of the audience and the artist. In Goethe's work, this darkness is still a moment in the process of creating a work of art and not part of the performance. In order to be able to bring the unavailable onto stage, performance art in which the process itself becomes a work of art had to develop first. The freedom of darkness, to use a term by artist Christoph Schlingensief, to transform it into vocal sound is one goal of the artistic search with the human voice as I practise it.
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