Finding stillness in sound

A few more thoughts about singing

Just before Christmas I stood up and sung the first verse of Away in a Manger in front of a hundred or so people, entirely alone. It was perhaps the scariest moment in an evening full of scary moments—so full of them, in fact, that I had no choice but to move through the fear and out the other side. I sang a lot of solos that evening, leaving my comfort zone so far behind me that it shrank to a tiny little dot, as if viewed from space.

That first verse of Away in a Manger felt to me like the highest-stakes solo of all, not because the song itself is difficult, but because there was absolutely nowhere to hide. If I stumbled or faltered, if my voice cracked or wobbled, everyone in the room would hear and feel embarrassed for me. My dignity was on the line.

Fortunately, none of those things happened. What happened instead was that I sang it better than I ever had before—or at least, that’s how it seemed to me as the moment unfolded. The secret ingredient was adrenaline, I think. It either made me sing better or tricked me into believing I was singing better. Whichever it was, it felt incredible: to open my mouth and let my voice fill the church, to be engulfed in sound of which I was the source, and to sense that sound connecting me to everyone else in the room.

I hadn’t been expecting exhilaration. The best I’d been hoping for was to avoid making a fool of myself, perhaps a few nice compliments at the end if it went well. But to my surprise, I enjoyed myself so much that once it was over, all too soon, I wished I could do it again.

I kept reliving the experience in my head the next day, and when I tried to pin down exactly what had been so great about it, I realised that it had given me the thing I am constantly seeking: suspension in the absolute present. ‘The Moment’ is our Holy Grail, chased so fervently as to have become a cliché, and yet still mostly eluding us. I look for it in meditation, yoga, swimming and walks in the forest, among other things, and more often than not it slips from my grasp, sometimes without me even realising. But singing that solo, with all eyes on me, one chance and one chance only to do a good job, it was impossible to be anywhere else. I’d cut ties with the soundtrack of mental chatter that tugs me back and forth between the past and the future. Everything but The Moment simply fell away.

In this regard, singing feels very different to writing. So much of writing is pitching forward: towards the next sentence, the end of the chapter, the dramatic scene that’s going to be brilliant, ‘The End’. You want to get to the next thing, and the next, and the next after that, and with all the forward motion there is little opportunity simply to sit back and be with what is. A piece of writing reaches its moment of full flourishing when it’s finished, but by that point the writer’s part in the process is over. They must cut the project loose from themselves and send it out to start a life of its own, handing the baton over to the reader.

For this reason, I can’t help but feel a bit jealous of composers and songwriters, who not only get to experience the satisfaction of creating something from nothing, but also—if they are performers too, or if they witness others performing their work—to experience the thing they have created reaching a sort of pinnacle of actualisation.

Because music, of course, reaches its moment of full flourishing not when it is finished, but when it is heard. In fact, it must be heard in order to be music at all; otherwise, it only has half a life. And so a musical performance is a process of bringing something alive, while the act of performing gives life to something in the performer that lies dormant in their everyday civilian existence, and together, music and musician co-create an aliveness that wasn’t there before. A ‘live’ performance is exactly that.¹ It is all the more special because the audience is not dispersed across time and space, but right there in the room, sharing in the aliveness as it is brought into being. There is something magical about this process; something fleeting and irretrievable and unquantifiably precious, because ‘The Moment’ is the only place in which it can exist.

I’ve spent what feels like a very long time entertaining a suspicion that life would be vastly improved if only I could manage to keep up a daily meditation habit. I’ve been to a lot of classes at my local Buddhist centre, where they find all sorts of ways to tell you exactly this, and I’ve had enough enjoyable experiences of meditation to think they might be onto something. The present moment is a good place to be; I want to spend more of my life there.

But it’s only since my Away in a Manger realisation that it occurs to me there might be other ways of being present that suit me better than sitting on a cushion and following my breath. A couple of days after I published my last post, about having singing lessons, I had a message from my good friend Flo, who’s been meditating regularly for years and is now a trained mindfulness teacher. She said that the way I’d described my feelings about singing had resonated for her, because she feels the same way about mindfulness.

Perhaps singing is my meditation, after all.² It seems to me that somewhere at the heart of it—this very strange and yet entirely normal act of making music with nothing but your body—is a kernel of calm, of weightlessness, where the past and the future fall away, and you can float there, untethered, just for a while. Sometimes, I am realising, finding stillness does not mean falling silent. Sometimes it means making a sound.

Thanks for reading! If you liked this post, please consider *liking* it too by clicking the little heart below. It helps the algorithm get the word out and is also just really nice to see!

And because there are a few new people here and I haven’t written one of these reminders in a while: I wrote a book you can read. It’s a bit different to the sort of stuff I write on Substack but who knows, maybe you’ll like it. This is the UK edition and this is the US edition.

1. If you’d like to hear a profound and poetic take on the process of recording music, I refer you to this scene from the 2022 film Vengeance.

2. I love

Maia Duerr

’s ‘Tree of Contemplative Practices’, which suggests all manner of activities that might serve a mindful or meditative function in one’s life without being ‘meditation’ per se. Singing is one of them.