Singing With Intention

This is actually a follow-up to my last blog post about how yoga can benefit your singing. Since intention is sort of a big topic, I think it warrants its own post. The basis for this idea is simple: music affects the listener (and the performer). I suppose this is something I have always known, but it began to become more clear to me in high school with both choral and solo music. One distinct memory I have is listening to Verdi’s Requiem in high school and feeling like I had been physically changed. I also remember hearing Henry Purcell’s song “Music for a While” for the first time. The first line of the song says it all: “Music for a while, shall all your cares beguile.” Once I became aware of this phenomenon, I continued to seek it in musical experiences.

I took some acting classes at HB Studios in New York. At HB, they teach "the method" and speak of intentions (this is where Uta Hagen taught). I'm sure this is very common in acting, but I only know my experience. If you are studying a scene, you consider your intention in each line you give. The question might be, "What is my intention in delivering this line" or "what do I want from the other character?" This is useful in singing, for dramatic purposes, but it can go deeper.

I began practicing yoga while in graduate school, but I didn’t start going to classes regularly until around 2011, when I started going to A Garden for Wellness in Clarkesville, GA. There I learned the idea of setting an intention for a yoga practice. I’ve never actually discussed this idea with a yoga teacher or other people in (or out of) a yoga class, so I don’t know what people use as their intention. I am sure that intentions vary wildly from “to relax” or “to get exercise” to things like “heal my cancer” or “become one with the earth.” I can’t claim that anything miraculous has happened to me yet after setting an intention for yoga, but maybe it is like praying--there aren't always immediate results. I like the idea of setting an intention and found that it could be applied to singing.

Even before I knew about setting intentions, I would hope to change the audience in some way when giving a recital or other performance. This affects everything from my repertoire selections and order, to the lighting in the performance space. After learning about the idea of setting an intention, I began to keep the intention of “changing lives.” While this sounds like a lot of pressure, I believe you can change lives through singing, even in small ways. If you make someone’s day better by helping them to focus on something other than their problems for an hour, then you have changed their life. Adding an element of beauty to someone’s day changes their life. Bigger changes can happen too, of course!

This idea will be continued in my next post about inspiration!