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Telling my profession thanking the song
Dear diary,
I have been writing for a long time but the time of listening never ends ... So in these years of meeting with voices and people who have entrusted me to me, I have never noted anything!
... how can the power and empathy of the ties that are established during the speech therapy charge can be described?
With what words?
I have always found it reductive and not sufficiently effective to express what really happens within the setting of this fascinating work: because, if it is true that science leads us to knowledge, only the conscious experience leads us to wisdom, e to understanding and, last but not least, to interpretation.
How do you do, dear diary, to describe this "everything"?
Do you really believe that you can boast a copyright on the methodological dynamics of voice and singing?
Are we really so presumptuous and so little generous that they think of knowing everything, or rather, to assume that what "learned from books" is ours alone? ...
Who like me loves voice and singing, do not just bring methods back, but rather shares the experience, that experience that passes first of all from our vocal experience, emotional and, only long after, technical.
Only now after 25 years (Wowwww !!! silver wedding with my profession) I find myself here to think about the reason for this passion for my voice and, even first of all, on why my choices through the memory of me girl.
To understand what is the origin of our work choices, our passions, we should learn to divide our life into stages, or rather, in phases. In my case, personal and professional growth followed the path that had a single destination: discovering the voice, this stranger! As in a long journey. ... how many places to be discovered and to visit !!!
I would like to try to describe the stages of my work with some famous phrases:
the first " unconscious phase"
All adults were children but only a few are remembered….
(from "Ll Piccolo Principe" by Saint -Exupéry)
Free singing, emission of unconditional resonant truth has always characterized me since I was a child.
I, privileged in living in a seaside city like Naples, already at the age of 6 I am entertained to sing against wind on the extreme bow of the boat and I was happy !!!!! ... as Plutarch who trained for his multiple activities, overcoming the roar of the waves with the voice.
The most bizarre thing is that at that age I didn't even know who Plutarch was and the most exciting was that I was not conscious, aware of what I did ... I had fun inventing melodies regardless of what came out of my slender physicality, so much Nobody could hear me ... and, strong of this, I gave strength and form to "my" free singing, which could not be freed.
At that time my parents separated and so the singing became a moment for me in which to take refuge and screamed my pain, my disappointments, my betrayed confidences, my anger ... my anger ...
And this I remember it still tight in my work when I take care of the dysfonical children, and helps me to understand their vocal sufferings, their "communicative dysfunction", their "dialing dysphonia".
The trust that give me in getting "cure" becomes a possibility to be able to take care of myself in a certain sense: we become so complicit in a rebirth!
And, when my parents decided to direct me first to an instrument, the guitar, and subsequently I sing I realized that the item should be polite and the music must be studied .
I had two singing masters to whose memory I am still so tied. At the time, the singing teacher par excellence was a master of lyrical singing and, following this methodology, I really learned many important things, first of all the discipline. Only after any years did I find a "modern" singing teacher closest to the genre I wanted to sing, who followed me for years, until my entry at the university and therefore then to the course of Technician of Foniatria - Diploma for special purposes (so It was called the current speech therapy degree)
Yes, I was definitely going towards something special ... indeed "very special": restore the voice to people !!!!!
Here begins the II body awareness and the second famous phrase that characterized it:
The voice is not something we have, but something we do
(Franco Fussi)
We are all agreed that the voice is the result of the operation of systems connected to each other. The deepening of the speech therapy is very severe in this regard.
A speech therapist must perfectly know the respiratory, chewing, swallowing system and also must be an almost obsessive expert of the advertisements of the muscles and ligaments that put into operation .. in vibration the cordale plan, the function of the language, the role of the resonators etc. etc etc….
Only in this way does it become perfect connoisseurs of physiology, pathology, postural system and its correlations on vocal emission: all of us, for example, we know from experience that a tense body generates a tense voice ... etc etc ...
The professionalizing internship before and clinical practice afterwards will enable us to the profession impeccable. But we will continue to form, to attend refresher courses, university master's degree ... we will perhaps also have the luck of becoming teachers ... And this is where we should ask ourselves a question that I personally asked me: do we really know everything?
And it is precisely this curiosity that starts the III phase: an ideational phase , with this sentence:
You reasons with the eyes for this you are difficult to deceive
(cit. Karate Kid 3)
For Socrates, educating first of all means "knowing yourself".
However, the teacher does not refer to closed and selfish individuality, but unlike that self -care that is practiced through a slow and progressive path of asceticism towards the universal that is pre -existing in every single man.
For educators, the path begins with the recognition of the limits of what is possible and of what is achievable. This moment is characterized by the encounter with the "impossible item to recover" ... moment of great frustration for a passionate and cultured therapist.
Then the creative phase makes itself wide, where through one's experience and above all to the ability to listen (by listening I do not mean psychological listening), but the ability to translate through a careful ear, the rings dirty in tactile sensations ... touch the voice And remodel it: I believe that in current speech therapy practice and in the study plan, little importance is given to the ear ability to discriminate, recognize and identify sounds.
This ability helped me a lot to transform non -euphonic sounds into euphonic sounds. There is a moment, perhaps a thousandth of a second sometimes, in which the rumor we are dealing with, during a vocalization, becomes clean ... and you have to know how to catch that moment! That moment is essential to transform a moment of therapeutic failure into joy.
I believe that the ear is the "brain" of the voice, especially in the singers !!!!
Phase IV Personal awareness:
Ambition without knowledge is like a boat on the mainland
(anonymous)
In this phase I enclose all my dissent and pain for those people who work undisturbed in our area. And not only. I ask these people: do you really love what you do?
So if yes, why don't you sacrifice yourself with recognized studies to be enabled to say and do what you already do and say without a legitimate base?
The answer is no !!! Because you only love yourself and your vanity, and not the people you take into charge ... and who rely on you.
I could not fail to go through this controversy, because I am this!
My intellectual honesty, my rigor, my morality, have done me what I am today: a lover of truth.
Because the voice is above all this, it is truth and we must deserve it!
I finish this page of my diary with my quote that I think contains my way of working and my passion, that joy that pervades my profession:
final phrase :
The speech therapy teaches not to look for where there is more light ... ..but to observe where no one would go to look ...
... operating in the artist's interest.
Marina Tripodi)Thanks Albert for bringing me to a further reflection of what they are!
Read also the article: Choir of white voices: the first steps in choral singing in childhood and adolescence
