I have a confession to make: I secretly love singing and I love working with vocalists. Some of my favorite gigs to perform include works like Mozart’s Mass in D and Requiem, Handel’s Messiah, Holst’s Four Songs for Voice and Violin, you name it. Not just because said gigs tend to be more laid back, but because I enjoy the musicality that follow vocalists around 24/7. I cannot help but be fascinated with how vocalists carry themselves daily. Vocalists approach music with their whole being as their instrument comes from their body: their voice. In many ways, I find vocalists are the embodiment of musical expression.

I never thought that my musical career would be so close to vocalists and singing in any way. I wanted to pursue my doctorate so that I could be a violin professor at a college or university. But those positions prove to be elusive at the moment, so I kept myself open to whatever might come my way. Unexpectantly, an interim director position opened up at a church and I took a chance. My role was to direct the senior choir and select hymns for church services. It was different from my career wishes, but to my surprise, I greatly enjoyed directing the senior choir. One year later, and the term “interim” was taken out of my position’s name.

Retrospectively, voice was my very first instrument, as I suspect it is the first instrument for many. I grew up attending a Lutheran church my dad was serving every Sunday. The services I attended and prefer to this day are very liturgical in nature, meaning there’s lots of singing involved. In fact, I spend most of my time during services silently asking: “Are we going to sing again? When do we sing again? Can we sing again?” Is it partly to do with how music tends to keep my attention span focused? Most likely. But music has always been the easiest way I express myself and feel connected to others. Singing is no different.

Everything musical, for me especially, begins with my voice. Music is expression, music is art, and music is human. Therefore, to master musical expression, one must connect with their voice and breath.

I think true musical expression has gotten lost throughout history as perfected studio recordings have the power to erase imperfections. Us musicians have become obsessed with the idea of perfection that is no longer sustainable. We’re obsessed with perfection to a point that our own expectations have become robotic. There is beauty in imperfections; imperfections are the very essence of human nature.

While plenty of musical instruments create sound through breath, this is not the case for string players. String players, most definitely, are guilty of becoming forgetful regarding breathing. So many of us are guilty of rushing so dramatically because we’re not thinking about our breath. It’s our way of showing off, it’s our way of being divas. Us string players will often forgo any kind of rest; quarter rest, eighth rest, sixteenth rest, who cares?! We don’t need to breathe! We can totally skip over it, right?

The process of my own understanding of tying my own musical expression to voice and breath didn’t start until around my undergraduate years at Gettysburg College. Admittedly, a lot of things in violin and music come naturally to me. Lyrical phrasing is one of my greatest strengths. At the time, however, I never truly thought of it from a vocal perspective. If you were to ask me when I was in high school how I played so lyrically, I don’t think I would have been able to properly verbalize it. The early days of my musical career was based on vibes alone.

It really wasn’t until my professor, Dr. Yeon-Su Kim, assigned Mozart’s Violin Conerto No. 5 to me did I start to process my understanding of musical expression, breath, and voice. At the time, Mozart wasn’t a composer I particularly liked, and I think Dr. Kim made it her goal to change my mind within my first-year. Throughout my lessons, Dr. Kim consistently pointed out the importance of opera in relation to Mozart’s compositions. She expressed that I needed to really do my research regarding the history of the work, as well as the important role opera had in Mozart’s compositional writing so that I could further understand how to interpret the piece. She believed that it was extremely important that I approach my learning of the piece from an opera singer’s perspective.

Upon the first time hearing this, I rolled my eyes. I didn’t particularly have a good opinion of vocalists at the time (I found so many vocalists to be too loud and cheerful; all much too loud for a massive pessimistic introvert like I was in undergrad), so I initially disregarded her comments. But Dr. Kim proved that her patience could last longer than my stubbornness, and kept repeating her point every lesson until it stuck. Sometime by October of my first semester, I started to understand her vision as I started to create my own imaginative opera set to this concerto.

My violin was to be the voice of a ditzy soprano character who was just so bubbly and ecstatic that she had fallen in love. Come the second movement, she would grapple with the thought that, perhaps, her love was more of a limerance and unrequited love. By the movement’s end, she reassures herself that her love is true. Then, come the third movement, a fight—between two individuals who wish to marry her—breaks out in the middle of a banquet, a dance if you will.

Naturally, creating some sort of story is what I have always done with music. But through Dr. Kim’s encouragement, studying a concerto from the lense of an opera singer opened new doors. Suddenly, I was focusing on details such as “where would the singer actually take a breath for this phrase?” or “what kind of silly faces would the vocalist make here at this moment?” or “which character is singing here and how does it equate to the scene?”

Sounds incredibly silly, I know.

Was this exactly what Dr. Kim wanted me to do when she insisted that I think of opera while study Mozart’s 5th violin concerto? Probably not. But the point is, she got me thinking differently, which is the point in taking lessons in the first place.

I think back on that memory often and how much it has stuck with me over the years. So many people over the years have asked me how do I make phrasing seem so easy. Some people are envious of the lyrical sound I produce. While a lot of it, as I stated earlier, comes naturally, I can now finally verbalize it properly:

I approach music as a vocalist, not as an instrumentalist. I have always done this, even in my early days as a violinist.

Some musicians have tried to approach music making by creating scientific methods. Some use numbers to keep track of the most important parts of the phrase, tediously making note of every tiny detail. While these approaches are fine and good, especially for score studying purposes, I find when applied that these approaches cause the music to sound cold. In a world that is so scientific, so mathmatic, and so technologically focused, it’s hard to remember that music is an art above all else. Science, math, and music coincide with each other, but each have their own seperate identity.

For me, approaching music with such sterile, methodological focus is counterintuitive, for music is not necessarily meant to be precise. I never quite understood the obsession with perfection some musicians, particularly instrumentalists, have in their day to day life. Sure, we all strive to be our best, but perfection? As stated earlier, that’s not humanly possible. Not even AI can achieve perfection since it is a human invention at the end of the day.

Again, I cannot say it enough: music is human expression and it is supposed to be imperfectly beautiful. This is why breath and voice are so important in music; it is because these two things come from our own body, our own self. For instrumentalists, it is so easy for us to separate our voice from our music because our focus goes into the techniques and mechanics of playing our instrument. But we have to remember, that our instruments are an extension of our voice, our instruments are an extension of the self.

I have to imagine that vocalists and other wind players (woodwinds and brass) that this concept isn’t necessarily new. While I’m sure some of your methodological approaches aren’t exactly like a vocalist’s, breathing is very much a part of every lesson, I must imagine. But for string players like me (and maybe keyboardists can relate to this as well), conversations about breathing rarely come up in lessons. Most of our lessons are focused on technical and mechanical issues that arise when you have to hold an instrument so unnaturally as a violin. Fixing technique is important and vital, but there comes a point where the pure technical and mechanical aspects of an instrument get in the way of the music. While not every piece of music is an opera, we must remember that every piece of music has voices and characters.

We must always return to the breath and the voice.

In a dream world where I became the professor I had wished to become, I would make some requirement for my students to be involved vocally in music. Be it through chorus or bringing in a voice professor to studio classes from time to time. That is how much I value the breath and the voice when it comes to violin playing.

I currently have a young student who started lessons with me in 2022 and is extremely passionate about music. Violin is their main instrument, but every summer, they take lessons of another instrument to feed their musical curiosity. This past summer, they took voice lessons. Before they went on this musical adventure, we had been discussing the finer details of violin playing which go deeper than simple technique and mechanics. It wasn’t until this student returned from their voice lessons this summer did our previous discussions finally sink in. They now approach violin and music much differently. Instead of constantly wanting to play as fast as possible, they understand why taking a consistent and comfortable tempo is important. Their understanding of phrasing of certain melodies is further developed. They now approach music with breath, with their voice, and with their whole self in mind. Because of this change, I am forever grateful that they took voice lessons on their own accord. It has already done wonders for their musicality alone.

My students often give me strange looks when I begin my tangent about how “we are one of the few instruments that do not require breath to make sound” and think I’m ridiculous for talking about it as passionately as I do. I tell them this as a reminder that their voice, musical or not, is important. In our current society, it is too easy to forget to think of our breath and our voice. We go great lengths to hide our heavy breathing after exerting any amount of energy, we do everything we can to supress our voices to be likeable. There was a time in my life where I felt as though my voice did matter, but it was through music where I felt like my voice, through my violin, could be truly heard. I must imagine that there are other musicians who feel the same.

The musical instrument, whatever it may be to you, is not just a tool used to create beautiful sounds; it is an extension of you, your breath, and, most importantly, your voice. Not all of us were born to be vocalists, but it is through our instruments that we can still beautifully sing.