Why I Sing
When I was a child, my mother’s voice was always in my ear. A classical Turkish music singer, she sang a capella at home, and I heard her accompanied by an orchestra at rehearsals and concerts. She loved to sing. Every day she practiced her current piece or next radio program, her beautiful voice permeating my soul without my even being aware. At bedtime she would croon Brahms Lullaby into my ear until I slept.
My mother, Asuman Aslım, was a soloist in the Turkish Radio & Television Institution during my earliest years. I accompanied her to rehearsals or concerts at the TRT building. I grew up in that building. It is called ‘’Istanbul Radio’’ but it was more like Topkapi Palace. Large marble steps at the entrance led to a big, heavy metallic door. It looked like a giant’s door to a little boy. Inside it was more a museum than a radio building: historic microphones, old LP discs, antique gramophones, old photographs of famous singers and musicians.
For me the building was a mystery house. I ran through the hallways, exploring everywhere except the recording studios. The studios were serious business. but they let me sit with the tonmeister—the one responsible for the over-all sound of the recording—behind the soundproof glass. I remember the entire orchestra, chorus, and soloists of the Institution recording music. When the green light turned to red for the recording, I’d hear all the musicians creating their powerful sound together, then I’d hear my mother’s distinctive voice from the speaker. The sound of her soprano coming in above the orchestra always gave me a special feeling I cannot quite put into words.
But often I explored while they performed. As I ran about playing pretend games listening to the music, I intuitively gained an understanding I still pursue today, that music is serious business and must be created with great care and sensitivity. How intense it was to listen to music being recorded in that institution. I can still hear those pieces of Turkish classical music composed by musicians long ago, now sung by heart, and with heart, rather than mathematically following a written score.
Little boys are not highly-developed aesthetes. Soon I would get bored, wondering when my mother would finish and we could go home! Boredom, at least while listening to music, must not be such a bad thing. I had no idea, as my mind wandered to thoughts of dinner, as the cymbals clashed their Ottoman rhythms, as my mother’s voice rose like a lark above the crowded noises below, that boredom was creating my path of life.
When I was barely a teenager, like all my peers, I started to play guitar, drums and keyboard but I never developed passion for an instrument. I knew within me something was waiting. Something I could not express with a musical instrument. My mother saw I was struggling with the instruments and said: ‘’Why not try to sing?’’ The question surprised me. Although I was raised with music I was quite shy about singing. In fact, I hadn’t sung anything in my entire life. I never tried to use my voice to carry a tune till that moment.
Why had I never tried singing? I assumed my voice was ugly and nobody would want to listen to it. It never occurred to me my voice might be my instrument. “No”, my mother told me. “Forget about the voice, singing is about nourishing your soul and having new perspectives on life.” It was a hard for me to understand what she meant at that young age but when I started to sing, her words immediately rang true in my veins. As an introvert teenager I saw that singing would be how I express myself and how I find new colors in my personality.
My voice type is bass, the lowest of the voice types. In Opera there are many characters for basses: Fathers, Devils, Bad Guys, Soldiers etc. As you can imagine we are not like tenors, because in Opera tenors always get the girls on the stage, basses do not! But that is another topic…
In Opera when a character expresses feelings and thoughts it is called an ‘’Aria’’. In each opera, I meet a new version of a human soul, and in each aria I experience and express that character’s emotions. The person I perform is completely different from the person I am. What a way to understand other human souls and widen my own inner World! So with every aria and character I develop better empathy and I find a new ways to look at life. I get to inhabit the souls of complex characters wrestling with deep moral and emotional issues.
When I sing I feel my soul expand like a surging river. To sing the character’s song you need to find his emotional path and sometimes it’s not pretty. Hatred, lust, greed, revenge, you name it! You have to cross the big mountains into new emotional territories. The experience is unique and individual.
Singing is different for each person and for every song. Perhaps singing can be described as a metamorphosis anyone, singer or listener, can experience, giving us access to a realm of understanding and experience without beginning or end. Like life itself. Always changing and finding the shape in the road.
When I sing, my voice carries my soul to share with others. There is a German saying, Stimme und Charakter sind parallel, or “Voice and character are parallel’’. Singing reveals character. So why do I sing? I sing because I want to be understood, to connect with people, to have an adventure, to explore, to understand the world, to change things for the better...
Yes, that is all true, but the real reason I sing? I leave behind my entire burden of trouble when I sing. I am in a different world. I feel alive and fully present in a world that has no beginning and no end…
© 2023 Cumhur Görgün
