Musicality

I would like to share an idea given to me out of Steve Smith's book The Naked Voice, which I will now paraphrase.  The book is fabulous and I highly recommend it.  Smith articulates that musicality, or expressiveness, is innate to the human voice.  Musicality occurs by being sensitive to the music, giving more or less dynamically to stress and unstress certain pitches or parts of a phrase. It gives emotion to music that would otherwise be static.  When an instrumentalist tries to be musical, he must affect his instrument in some way to do so.  For example, a woodwind player must change his breath rate and/or the shape of his mouth to change the tone coming out of the instrument.  The instrument does nothing to adapt to the changes in the player's brain, where musicality comes from.  The wonderful thing about the human voice is that it is part of us as beings.  It adjusts to everything we think and feel as we sing, or otherwise.  We do not need to adjust our breath rate to be musical, the act of singing itself is inherently musical.  A free voice is an expressive one, and trying to change that by controlling our expression, or effectively inhibiting our natural musicality is completely unproductive, and in the end, not musical at all.  So the next time you feel like you need to give more in order to be musical, just remember, the freer your voice, the more natural musicality will come, instead of the fake stuff.  Trust those feelings, so you are able to let your voice be as musical as it naturally is.