Communication And Art

In trying to understand the experiences of other people, we always run the risk of making grave errors. Human beings are not mind readers; nor can we peer directly into the consciousness of other people, and know exactly what they are thinking or feeling. We have to rely, instead, on observation, reasoning, and empathy to try to understand the personal worlds of others. And even when we think that we have been successful in this effort, there is still a great deal that escapes us, which is simply beyond our normal powers of understanding. The same problem exists in the opposite direction. To communicate to people what we really think and feel is one of the greatest challenges of our lives, a challenge that we typically meet with limited success, despite our best efforts. Even those talented individuals who are highly skilled in the fine art of communication, such as teachers, writers, and politicians, often find themselves continuously having to repeat, re-formulate, and clarify their thoughts and feelings.

This problem becomes truly daunting when we try to express beautiful ideas, deep feelings, philosophical insights, and our fondest hopes and dreams, not to mention when we try to share the emotions of love or the wonder of being alive. In these instances, our communication skills, however refined, fail us time and time again.  But the human race is very resourceful in devising creative solutions for difficult problems. A good example of an ingenious solution in this particularly challenging area of communication is art. One of the wonders of instrumental and vocal music, literature, theatre, poetry, painting, drawing, sculpture, architecture, dance—any art form, for that matter—is their unexcelled capacity to bridge the vast, uncertain, personal spaces that separate one person from another, and to penetrate the barriers of our differences—in a word, to light-up, in profound and innovative ways, our common humanity.

Singing is among the most esteemed of all high art forms precisely because of its unmatched ability to communicate mightily on an emotional level.  Because good singing is demanding on both a physical and artistic level, it’s not surprising that many singers fail at meeting their obligation to communicate powerfully. They fail because they are unable to make the words that they sing, the emotions that they feel, and the message they are delivering, real, viscerally real, to the listener. Some singers meet this obligation occasionally, perhaps in a song or series of songs in a particular performance or recording. Some singers, like Michael Jackson, are able to communicate powerfully even in their youth, while others, such as Frank Sinatra, cultivate their communication skills as they mature, and reach their highest level of expression in middle age. Some great singers—and these are few and far between—are able to sustain exceptional artistic communication consistently throughout a lifetime. We might think of tenor Luciano Pavarotti, Stevie Wonder, and Aretha Franklin in this light.

 While I was on tour with Frank Sinatra and Shirley MacLaine in 1992, I recall listening to Sinatra singing one night at Radio City Hall in New York and bemoaning the fact that I had never heard the legend sing live in his prime. At this stage of his life, his performances were very inconsistent; sometimes his voice was passable and at other times, his voice sounded old, worn-out, and frayed. But on this particular night something astonishing happened: seemingly out of nowhere, he momentarily found his peerless sound and sang a few lines from his classic One For My Baby with power, tonal nuance, emotion, and understanding which moved some of us in the audience to tears. It was at that moment that I finally understood the meaning of authentic communication in singing.

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