Your voice is unique to you. It grows as you grow. It changes as you change. If you’re curious about the relationship between your voice and your body, your heart and your mind, welcome. My name is Michèle Voillequé and I can’t wait to hear you. 

I think it’s time for me to come clean about something. I think I might’ve already said this before, but I feel it bears repeating. And that is that I firmly believe that singing is for everybody.

I’ve been teaching music for over 20 years now. My first tagline for my business was, “We’d all have more fun in line at the DMV if we were singing.”

Now, at least in California, you don’t even have to go to the DMV anymore. You can do it all online, but at the time, in the mid-aughts, going to the DMV was a half-day adventure, and I really did feel that we’d all have more fun if we were singing.

And I do believe that singing is for everybody.

Singing is something that humans for thousands of years have done to celebrate, to comfort, to grieve, to soothe, to tell stories, to keep track of histories, to give directions – all kinds of ways that song has been used to hold communities together and to retain and transmit information.

It’s just infuriating to me now that we have a culture where people think that if they’re not a professional, they should be embarrassed about their singing.

It just makes me really mad. I feel like there are many, many more people trapped silently feeling ashamed for no good reason than there would ever need to be.

It’s sort of an irony to me that this art, this activity of singing, which has connected and held communities together, now I meet person after person who is afraid of using their voice because they’re afraid of being ostracized.

They’re afraid that their singing will get them, maybe kicked out of a community is the wrong way to put it, but will cause their relatives to tell them to stop. Their roommates won’t wanna hear it. Their family will make fun of them. They’ll lose credibility in front of their workmates.

That singing is somehow now a dangerous activity. It’s a risk taking activity – way too big. It feels way more risky than it should have any right to.

So if you were to ask me “who is singing for?” I’m always gonna say, singing is for everybody.

And if you want to learn to use your voice differently, sing more effectively, you ought to have safe spaces available to you to do that.

I really feel like that’s a fundamental human right, that we figure out how we want to use our voices. I really believe the world needs us to be doing that, and so really that’s my mission as a voice teacher.

If I could wave a magic wand, it would be to allow everyone who wants to sing, the freedom to sing and to give them as many skills as they want to sing, as well as they would like to.

I don’t think we all have to be singing beautifully. I just want us all to be singing. I really think that we can handle it if it’s not perfect. I think the world can handle it if it’s a little ugly, if it’s brassy. We can handle it. We’re strong enough.

Singing really is for everybody. I want everybody who wants to be singing, to be singing.

So in a way to that end, I am teaching a program, a class right now called A Singer’s Advent.

Advent is the time of the year where we’re counting down to Christmas. It’s the four weeks before Christmas, and in the Christian tradition, each of those weeks has a different theme that we’re supposed to meditate on in order to prepare ourselves for the miracle of Jesus’s birth.

I am not a Christian. I’m using “we” in a very general way here, but I have been a church musician for most of my life now.

And advent has been a part of my life kind of whether I like it or not, but luckily I do like it even though I myself am not a Christian, I enjoy the season.

So the first week of Advent has the theme of hope, and then it’s peace, and then joy, and then love. And the idea is that we meditate on these things to prepare ourselves spiritually, to make room for the miracle that is the birth of the Christ Child.

I really don’t think you have to believe that Jesus’s birth is a miracle to get something out of this. Every year, I have appreciated the opportunity to contemplate hope and peace and joy and love, because I find them very difficult to hold onto, particularly in December.

So, the birth of Jesus has been called by more than one person, “God’s full employment plan for musicians,” and I have found that to be true.

There is so much music at Christmas time. There are so many concerts. There are so many special services. There are so many opportunities to make music in December, I find myself more often than not feeling overbooked, over-scheduled, running from one thing to another and a little, or a lot, unbalanced.

December rarely, of all of the months of the year, if I were gonna pick the month that feels the most unbalanced, it’s going to be December in terms of, you know, the balance of work and rest, the balance of joy and stress.

And maybe you can relate. I think you probably can, even if you’re not a musician. I think December for a lot of people is the most unbalanced month, and so it’s particularly lovely that this is the month when we’re asked to contemplate these higher ideals and to try to make them real in our heart.

I think the work of Advent is right on time, because at almost any other time of the year, I don’t have a hard time slipping into hope. I can find joy pretty easily. Love? Pretty solid with that. Peace? I can get there.

You know, on a really hectic December day? No, those are all going to feel really far away. And so, my thought about developing this program called A Singer’s Advent was, could I, the hectic, scattered church musician, could I arrive on Christmas Eve feeling ready for Christmas?

Meaning, feeling ready for a miracle, ready to be filled with awe, with wonder. Ready for that beautiful silent moment at the end of the last worship service where you can just feel how everything is holding its breath. Everyone’s holding their breath and you’re on the cusp of something. It’s almost like you can feel the earth turn.

It’s so moving.

It’s such a beautiful moment and I would love to sink into that moment on time. On Christmas Eve. Because frankly, most years I’m ready for that moment, I can find that moment on or about December 28th, you know?

And there’s nothing wrong with that. I’m grateful that I can find it. But what if, what if I could find it on Christmas Eve?

So I was contemplating these advent themes, and then I put them together with the four things that we really need to cultivate healthy singing.

And those are openness in the body, a grounded sense of being, effective breath support and comfort with our vulnerability. And they just line up great with the advent themes.

So I’m recording this in early December. This is week one, so I’m spending this week meditating on hope and openness, and it’s really beautiful to me how hope and openness are supporting each other.

As I’m allowing hope into my body – thinking about breathing in hope, what does that feel like? – but allowing hope into my body, I notice that I’m expanding my capacity for it.

And having openness on my mind, reflecting on openness is really helping me to notice when I’m closed. It’s not just, you know, thinking about openness, it’s like, “Oh, am I open? Am I hopeful?”

And similarly, stretching my muscles, finding that literal openness of the body is helping my spirit to feel more spacious.

It’s not an easy time, December, and, working in a church there often is a heaviness that seems to come over the congregation beginning in November.

And some years it’s more palpable than others, but it’s the best word for it, I think is holiday dread. People start worrying about what Thanksgiving’s gonna be like and then, you know, the stress of December and you know, Hanukkah and Christmas and all the obligations and final exams and family coming home and financial stress, just the whole thing, there’s this heaviness that can descend over the congregation and also just sometimes sadness.

If you’ve lost anybody in the year that you would normally spend holidays with, this can be a really sad time. Even if they’ve been gone for years, it doesn’t have to be this year.

It’s just like, holidays can be rough, they can be sad, they can be full of unmet expectations and hard feelings and cruel words. I probably don’t need to tell you.

And so usually I, right about now, I’m starting to feel the beginnings of not so festive. But today on December 3rd, my head’s pretty clear and I think it’s because I’ve been contemplating hope and openness.

So I’m really looking forward to seeing how this unfolds. I’ll just walk you through what’s coming up next.

Week Two is peace and a grounded sense of being. Week Three is joy and effective breath support. And Week Four, which isn’t really a week ’cause it’s only four days long, is love and comfort with vulnerability.

And so what’s happening inside the course is for each week there are seven exercises, one for each day, but you don’t need to do an exercise every day.

You can do them in, well, you can do them in any order, and you can do as few or as many as you want, but they’re there to support you with the vocal theme of the week.

So this week, it’s openness. So there are seven exercises or explorations that you can do to explore openness in your body. And so the same for the other weeks.

And then there are six live calls on Zoom where I teach for a little bit and connect the two themes – the liturgical theme and the vocal theme, and we do some singing together and I can answer questions and help folks if they’re feeling stuck, and, you know, provide feedback on how their singing is going, if they like that.

The calls are all recorded, so even though we’ve already begun, we’ve had our first call, by the time this is released, we’ll have had two of the six calls, but that’s not a reason not to join us.

Because you can get so much out of the replays and so much out of the material that’s there – the lessons – and all of this material is available through the end of January.

So even if you don’t have the bandwidth to get to this before Christmas day, believe me, I totally sympathize with that kind of a life.you still have plenty of time to go through it before access expires at the end of January.

And, you know, contemplating, hope and openness, and peace and a grounded sense of being, and joy and breath support, and love and vulnerability – there is no bad time for that.this is work that can serve you throughout the year and you have the opportunity to make amazing vocal progress, I think during this time.

The exercises, the daily lessons are all under five or six minutes, but they’re not cheap. They’re, they’re concentrated doses. This really is information that you can use and that you will use again and again and again.

I’m really teaching foundational principles for singing well. There’s not a lot of fluff in this program.

And of course there are just tons of Christmas carols. So there are different carols for every week. There’s a resources section that has lyric sheets and a link to sheet music resources online, a big YouTube playlist, with versions of the songs that I think are easy to sing along to.

So there’s a lot of opportunity to sing and to reflect and to wonder and make connections and to contemplate and to embrace the best that this season has to offer.

If I haven’t said it directly. I think the best thing about this season is that it’s dark and it’s cold and everything can slow down. We don’t need to run around like chickens with our heads cut off. We really don’t. There is another option.

There is another way to be, at this time of year, and I am pleased that this program is connecting the dots for folks between a hobby that they really enjoy or maybe that they’re picking up again for the first time in a long time, or maybe picking up for the first time at all…

Like connecting, singing to how we feel otherwise. Connecting singing to the spiritual part of our life, connecting singing to our emotional wellbeing and letting them each support the other.

So that’s what’s up right now.

There’s a link in the show notes to join A Singer’s Advent, and if you’re not already on my email list, please get on it because I’m writing about this to my email list, too. So even if you’re not enrolled in the program, it’s what I’m talking about right now in my emails.

There’s one other tidbit that I’d like to offer.

This week, the BBC published an article about all the ways that singing is good for your health. And, my singer friends, we’ve been sending it around to one another and, you know, we’re reading it and going, “Well, yeah, duh, we knew that.”

But I’m, I’m putting a link in the show notes to it for you in case you just need a reminder, some encouragement, singing really is good for your health. The article goes on and on and on because there have been so many studies. This isn’t just, you know, anecdotal information anymore, like there are actual, medical studies showing that singing improves wellbeing in all kinds of areas.

So if, that helps tip you over the edge. If you are a person who has been feeling shy or ashamed or nervous about singing, “Doctor’s orders.” Does making it “doctor’s orders” change anything for you? I hope so. I really do hope so. Because singing is for everybody.

I wish you the calmest, most enjoyable month of December you could possibly have, and I’ll be back before the end of the year with another episode.

Thank you so much for listening.

If you enjoyed today’s episode, please rate and review on Apple Podcasts or wherever you listen. Every positive review helps new people find the show. Subscribing ensures you’ll learn about new episodes as soon as they come out. If you have a question about singing or speaking or being, please send me an email at letters@mvmusik.com.

That’s letters at M as in Mary, V as in Victor, M U S I K.com.

Transcripts and show notes are available on my website. You can subscribe to my newsletter there, too. Can’t Wait to Hear You is produced in conjunction with Particulate Media. I’m your host, Michèle Voillequé. I can’t wait to hear you.