I loved my early voice study with Richard Armstrong, loved the permission he gave me to let loose big, rage-filled sound. Thick multiphonics rumbled around within my chest and splayed their way up through my sinuses, many pitches all at once in areas used to being much tidier. I reveled in the tussle of aggressive, complex, layered sound, relied on my “false vocal cords”* for extra heft. At first I accessed this fire only under Richard’s purview; the sounds seemed dangerous, and finding them, mysterious. Sometimes they threatened to knock me off my feet. But my body’s physiological productivity was undeniable—and the dare, potency, and release met a need for which I had no language. Growling, shredding, and shrieking became the soundtrack for personal renovation. Soon I was offering these colors as part of my core artistic identity.
Rehearsing for an Autumn Leaf Performance fundraiser in artist Vivian Reiss’s exquisitely idiosyncratic mansion, I launched into chorded sounds within an URGE group improvisation. When the scene ended I felt surprisingly depleted and hollow. After eight years of vocal catharsis, had I come to the end of my anger? Had there been a backlog? Was I “done”? Though I dredged up the feelings needed for that night’s performance, the experience left me unsettled.
When I displayed my temper as a child, my mum called me Fifi rather than Fides. I was not “me” when I wasn’t a “good girl.” I can appreciate my mother’s wariness in relation to anger. Her father was known as Red for more than just his hair color, and she married a man who used anger to mask his sadness. Both Dad and Grandpa had ample drive, which helped them become successful, and although neither was physically violent I regularly witnessed my mother counterbalancing Dad’s quickness to rage. She typically defused my feelings of anger before I could acknowledge what was pent up inside. I didn’t learn how to work with anger, honor its strengths, or curtail its excesses. Its useful drive remained emotionally unintegrated, and I ended up using it as fuel for overworking, or as a way to sidestep sadness, just like my father before me.
When my oldest daughter was moving into puberty—all breasts, hips, and
hormones—I found myself avoiding her when she brought friends to the house. I couldn’t handle the sound of their voices, which had risen in pitch over the course of Grades Seven and Eight. This alarming ascent was not caused by any biological
changes; if anything, their voices should have deepened as they matured. I believe that their high, grating, skittish vocal timbre was in response to losing the more equal footing that girls have with boys in primary school. Learning to balance estrogen’s nurturing feelings with innate human aggression is difficult when female anger is taboo, when its healthy manifestation is rarely modeled. These young women sounded as if they were trying to please everyone, all the time, to stay safe … even within their own circle.
I recall Magda’s younger sister, Oksana, waltzing down the stairs late one morning, her eleven-year-old abandon expertly shredding, “Rrraaaarhh … Rrraaaarhh … Why did your students have such a hard time with this today? Rrraaaarhh!” That morning’s 9:30 a.m. choir practice had brought up some potent stuff, and the group’s sense of politeness was challenged as they groped internally for more vocal space, more sensate permission. It takes time for a woman to free herself from socially sanctioned constraints in a culture that doesn’t acknowledge, value, or deal responsibly with either male or female anger and drive.