A woman who decides to work with her voice usually pictures one thing: learning to sing beautifully and starting to like herself on a recording. Meanwhile there are two different schools of voice work, and they lead in different directions. I went through both, and my practices grew exactly out of joining them.
The school of your own sound
The first school is Western, and I grew up in it as a jazz singer.
In the West it is all about developing your own sound, your sound, your sound, which is who I am.
The task there is clear: find a timbre people recognise from two notes and build an individuality around it. The voice becomes a signature, a personal territory, the thing by which a person is told apart from everyone else. For the stage this works without fail.
The school of dissolving
The second school came to me from India. I first went there around 2005 and travelled there for about eight years after that, studying with different teachers in different parts of the country.
The Indian classical system, rooted in the Vedic one, approaches notes differently: you hold your personal identity outside the notes. In the Vedic system it is all about dissolving into the notes, dissolving into the music.
That is an enormous amount of work: hours and hours of practice every day to land in the centre of a note, to find the colouring of these notes, to understand the rules of the ragas. And its meaning is the opposite of the first school. There the voice builds you, here the voice takes you beyond yourself.
My task there was to find the source of sound itself, and not at all to sing to gods and goddesses. Where it lives in the body, how it expresses itself in the body, how to join in it the emotional human nature and the connection with mystery.
Why a woman needs both
The path of a Vedic artist was to create music or theatre that takes a listener deep inside themselves and beyond the usual limits of their connection with reality.
That is the answer to the question of what a woman needs a voice for at all if she is not going on stage. The first school gives her the right to sound in her own way and to take up space with that sound. The second gives what comes after: a state in which the mind lets go of control and the body follows the vibration.
At concerts you can see it in the hall, and it makes no difference whether there are a thousand people there or seven thousand. People arrive in their ordinary, fairly disordered human state, and they leave changed, with a sense of connection, with a sense of love, having touched parts of themselves they might not have known existed.
Why it takes so long
The Vedic school has a feature worth saying plainly: there is a great deal of practice. Hours every day, for years.
The task sounds almost mathematical: land in the centre of the note, find its colouring, work out the rules of the raga. The singer removes herself from the sound and does it again and again, until the sound begins to live separately from the performer.
For a woman working with her voice at home, the main thing follows from this: nobody promises a quick result here, and that is normal. The voice changes at the same pace at which her relationship with herself changes.
The connection that was lost
There is one more layer to this story that lies deeper than technique.
When we lost the connection with our mother, with our mother earth, we truly lost a deep sense of love and trust in life and our reverence for our own bodies as women. Restoring that was a long healing path for me, and afterwards I helped others walk it.
The meditation practice I pass on grew exactly out of those years when I was learning to listen, to breathe, to receive and to be in communion with the earth.
The voice turned out to be the most direct instrument in that scheme. It comes from the body, sounds in the body and returns you to the body, and for that you need neither a stage nor listeners.
The two schools of voice answer two different needs in a woman: to be herself and to go beyond herself. A woman needs both, and they live together perfectly well in one body.
And if you want to work with your voice so that it returns you to your body and to your own frequency, take Peruquois's course Vocal Yoga, you will find it on the website under Courses.
Peruquois
A top World Music performer in Australia, musician, composer, author and facilitator of self-development trainings for women.
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