34 Spirituality Studies 9-2 Fall 2023 3 Connecting the Voice with Other Musical Practices: Silence and Deep Listening The holistic nature of singing calls for an intricate balance between the mental and physical processes involved. The voice is decisively linked to our own identity; we use it to communicate thoughts, emotions, and needs, it is directly involved in corporeality, and establishes connections with others and with the outside world. Consequently, the learning and practice of singing should incorporate means that integrate the emotional, the bodily, and the mental, and indeed reach well beyond this very integration towards contemplation as we understand it here, for the sake of a personal growth. Among these means are those tools that consciously help to practice contemplation from the point of view of philosophy (perceiving, observing, reflecting for greater self-awareness) and based on cultural strategies with religious roots (e.g., Confucianism, Taoism, Buddhism, Judaism, Christianity) or secular ones (e.g., mindfulness), as described above. These contemplative practices have been introduced in recent decades and have been the subject of specific research in the field of voice (Blackhurst 2021, 24–28). They are tools that seek to create the conditions for exploration, deepening and the development of the inner life of the individual. The multiple facets of these contemplative practices were organized according to categories and activities in the representation of a tree conceptually designed by Maia Duerr (2004) for The Center for Contemplative Mind in Society two decades ago. The success of this image is evidenced by the numerous references to the tree within the specialist literature (Barbezat and Bush 2013, 141; Owen-Smith 2018, 77). Of the more than seven categories and thirty types of activities into which these practices are classified graphically, only the branches related to stillness (silence), creative (music and singing), relational (deep listening), and ritual/cyclical (ceremonies and rituals based in spiritual or cultural traditions) are of interest for our proposal. We refer to these categories freely, since chanting in its phenomenological dimension (action to be performed) is a repetitive, generative, and non-linear process, and can therefore be accompanied and prepared by any of the resources historically, religiously, and culturally linked to meditation or contemplative prayer. These inputs include: the power of concentration (focus, attention), sensory clarity (discrimination, capacity for diagnosis, penetration), and equanimity (balance, letting flow, non-judgment). Thus, the practical concretization that is proposed in Section 5 explores the exercise of contemplative prayer through song within the context of the rituals or liturgy of the Christian tradition (ritual/cyclical). When the individual seeks a simple, spontaneous, and direct contact with “the principle” (spirit), he or she is unequivocally confronted with practices that include silence (stillness) and deep listening (relational). The inclusion of vocal music in this context is not a means of self-expression to assert one’s individuality, but a resource that is proposed to enter into silence and fulfills a function similar to that of Christian mantras or ejaculatory prayers: to lead us away from the reflective path and enter onto the contemplative one [5]. Assuming that “the principle” [6] is constituted by sound and silence, we must admit that the binomial is interdependent and that its (unintentional) symbiosis is privileged over (intentional) music. The reason is that music does not precede human existence and cannot be defined in absolute terms of thought and, consequently, is subject to the constrictions and meanings assigned to it. This special construction that music achieves based on the sound-silence binomial is in fact our original way of relating to the Other, to the world, and to our fellow human beings (relation). Sound and silence are defined by their potentiality for music which, as an external entity or musical product, becomes a social construct: a sign limited by a shared cultural experience whose meaning is only possible within that frame of reference (Cavia-Naya 2004, 64–66). Therefore, it is not this type of music that is of interest to our purposes as an objective, although it can serve as a means, as we shall see in Section 5. In the realm of meditation or contemplative prayer, the most important aspect of any practice is the process: letting things be without the bonds of the self. This interest points to a view of sound and silence as predecessors of our being and with an eternal potentiality that has been expressed in Western philosophy through the well-known music of the spheres, a concept we will discuss later in Section 4.2. In Eastern thought we find connections to Zen practices or the writings of Taoist philosophers such as Lao Tzu, who embrace mystery and the unknown as a fundamental part of real life with insights into nothingness and associated notions of absence and negation: presence through the complementarity of opposites (Yin–Yang) and nothingness, action/ non-action, sound/non-sound, passion/non-passion (neither sorrow nor joy).
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