Evelyn Glennie’s TED talk: How to truly listen to music

Evelyn Glennie explains why your ears are the least important part of the process of truly listening:

The Human Antennae: how listening to Russian will help you sing Better English

When you listen to a new song for the first time, you listen hard. You listen for the Important Words, the ones that carry the emotional message.  If the singer is doing their job properly, even when the song is in a language that you don’t speak, you will still pick up the extra emotional charge of certain sounds within it.

Try this: here’s one of my favourite songs in Russian. Yes, Russian. Don’t be scared.  The singer makes the emotional charge available to you, as one human being communicating with another. Like a foreign language exchange student who goes home with a whole new stock of English swear words, you will feel the emotionally charged words leap out of the soup of unknowns.  Honestly. Have a go. Which word or words jump out at you? :

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Singing Whales and Birds With Blue Feet

You can learn a great deal about English pacing and intonation by letting the voice of Sir David Attenborough wash over you for at least two minutes a day. Tweet of the Day is the best of birds:  http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b04dvvnn

BBC Radio 4’s The Listeners will take you to a world where listening with attention can make the difference between life or death:

Whale song and the varying sounds of the human heart : http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qm4p7

The low frequency language of elephants and the sounds of outer space: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qw9k2

The more closely you listen, the more you hear.

Enjoy.

© Sing Better English, 2014

Emancipate yourself from mental slavery

If you want to sing accurately in English, Mitchell Brunings’ story will be useful. You might have heard of him; the man whose version of Redemption Song in the blind auditions of The Voice of Holland sounded like Bob Marley reincarnated:

Sittin’ on the Dock of the Bay, watching the sheep roll in?

Roll up! Roll up! Otis Redding and his troupe of amazing, acrobatic, aquatic sheep. Famed throughout the world. Maybe Otis likes watching chips roll in? Everyone’s heard of San Francisco Bay’s famous, floating, fried-potato flotsam, haven’t they? Or is Otis watching something completely different?

From Lorca to Leonard Cohen and back again

It’s a marvellous thing to write music that suits the original flamenco Spanish of the Lorca  poem as much as your English translation:

 

A squillo

It’s a lovely thing to see image and movement in the service of knowledge.  Ming Luke provides the words, Franz Palomares brings them to life and Ted-Ed provides the screen:

© Sing Better English 2020

What the Stranglers did to their Diphthongs

R.I.P. Dave Greenfield. Keyboardist, songwriter and singer.

When you listen to the Stranglers’ song Golden Brown, pay close attention to the way Hugh Conwell sings the word brown:

Lighting every step on the Stairway to Heaven

Stairway to Heaven is a classic choice for song contests.  If English is your native language, don’t take the words of this song for granted. If English isn’t your native language, don’t take the words of this song for granted. The words matter.

They matter, but they’re not a liturgy.  Dave Grohl captures the heart of the song without reciting every word in order. Or at all:

Bunraku

Because singing is communicating and connecting. And because all the arts inform each other:

Making music

Music: Poppy Ackroyd

Director: Ainslie Henderson

Producers: Puppet Animation Scotland

Akala: Carried Away

The mouth is almost like a percussive instrument. If you use it in the right way, your flow can have melody coming from the vowel sounds, but then percussion coming from the consonant sounds. And your flow of how you divide up these consonants and vowels determines how nice an instrument your rapping can become.

Akala

Lady Leshurr

“I started thinking, ‘You know what? Why don’t I just rap?’ Because it’s just poetry with a beat behind it, really.”

Lady Leshurr in The Guardian.

Jazz, respect and memory

What’s a Polish song doing on a blog about singing in English? Blaszane Mordy is here to show that connecting with a song is a conscious skill, and an ability, that transcends language. You don’t need to understand Polish to ‘understand’ Lautari‘s Blaszane Mordy. Emotion pulses within the shape of the words alone: