Don't hold, don't aim

I just read John Weir’s new novel, What I Did Wrong.

The narrator, Tom, an English Teacher at Queens College, recollects an episode from his high school days. Scared of sports, and targeted as gay, some kids beat him up after gym class. Feeling hopeless, he goes to his best friend Richie’s house. Richie, a gifted athlete, distracts Tom by teaching him how to shoot a basketball. No one ever had the patience to teach this to Tom before, so until now he has judged himself to be “pretty bad.”

“I can’t even really hold a ball. I mean, forget throwing it. Forget aiming it.” Richie offers Tom two rules: Don’t hold the ball, and don’t aim. “Can you do those two things?” Tom shoots, and the ball goes in the basket, for the first time in his life. They play for an hour practicing baskets, and about half of Tom’s shots go in. It’s a huge accomplishment.

Tom realizes this was the happiest day of his life. “I don’t want kindness, exactly, or salvation, but just a way to grasp things and how to throw them away, a mental trick: Don’t hold, don’t aim.”

Weir could have written these passages to describe my singing. Both my problems (for years, no one was able to teach me the right way, I didn’t know how to hold or let go) and the solutions (Don’t hold, don’t aim).

As I practice this week, when I remember the “Don’t hold, don’t aim” rules my singing is better, easier, and more natural than ever before. I don’t tense up, and my vocal mechanism does pretty much what it’s been trained to do, without my conscious interference (“breathe, prepare, support, find the pitch, blah, blah”). This new ease isn’t consistent yet in all the music I sing, but a sprout is taking root. To sing using a conscious mental trick like “don’t hold, don’t aim” risks being distracting. One needs to keep one’s mind on how to make music, rather than on the mechanical operations of the voice. The rules will work best when they become automatic and unconscious.