Singing

I believe that to sing with others is to be truly alive. To experience the mix of voices and harmonies in a single song is to approach the divine. Does that sound preposterous? Have you tried it?

As a child, I loved singing: carols at Christmas, hymns in church, singing with my family in the car as we travelled to our seaside holidays.
Luckily, no-one ever told me I couldn’t sing, so I could.

In the 1980s, I decided I would take singing lessons to develop my voice. The first teacher and I weren’t suited, but I enjoyed my lessons with the second. At the beginning of the 1990s, I discovered the world of singing workshops. My first workshop was with Frankie Armstrong, the Godmother of natural voice. As we walked around the room singing, pausing every now and then to feel the harmonies shake the air, I felt a tectonic shift in myself. Reader, I changed forever.

I trained with Frankie in 1994 and set up my first evening singing workshops the following year. I called my first set of singing sessions Shaking the Grass because of this poem by Ezra Pound:

‘And the days are not full enough’

And the days are not full enough
And the nights are not full enough
And life slips by like a field mouse
Not shaking the grass

Hmmmm I thought. I’ll shake the grass by singing.

In the late 1990s I was one of the founding members of the Natural Voice Network.

If you’d like to find out about the singing groups I run, click HERE