This Time Through

The student had already begun singing. As she sang, the teacher reminded her several times: produce the sound from the abdomen. The reminders happened within this very run-through. When the chorus arrived, the teacher herself joined in. She sang out the accents, made the corresponding expressions on her face, and moved her head with the sentences. What was being demonstrated here was not only pitch. A short phrase about breath then became an audible vocal part, and then landed in movements of the face and head; one after another, they entered the song the student was in the middle of singing. An oral reminder needs only a few words; by the chorus, the requirement had acquired a length that could be followed, and no longer belonged only to the voice.

A single run-through of a song appears to be a very clear unit of time: begin singing, move forward, finish. Here, though, the boundary is not so neat. If the teacher’s singing-along were clipped out on its own, explanations would immediately gather around it. But those few seconds are not independent. Before them there had already been several reminders to produce sound from the abdomen, and the accents, expressions, and head movements appeared together with the singing-along. After this run-through ended, the teacher and student returned again to the relevant passage for practice. The instruction did not hand all its weight over to the second voice in the chorus; it appeared while the singing was underway, and after the song was finished it took the local passage out again.

“To have sung it once” did not close this passage of song; it only let the instruction change position. The first time, the teacher’s way of singing appeared beside the version the student was in the middle of singing; later, the same passage was taken out of the whole song and practiced once more. If the argument centers only on the moment when the teacher sang in, the reminders before it and the repeated practice after it will both be cut away. That moment cannot explain by itself what the student received, nor can it bear a fixed moral expression on behalf of the whole lesson. What is truly difficult to name in isolation is not any single voice, but this chain of sequence.

The duet had already reached the second verse. The lyrics again brought up a past episode of the man’s; he began laughing first, and the woman immediately burst into laughter. This interruption was not because the lyrics had not been understood; on the contrary, they had been heard too specifically. The plot written into the song met the past of someone present. The words still belonged to the song, yet at the same time became a prompt among acquaintances. The lyrics had originally been arranged to move forward through the second verse; once they touched shared memory, the listener’s response no longer headed only toward the next line.

Nor, just because the scene became lively, can this interruption be renamed a freer kind of joint singing. Laughing, the woman blamed the man for making everyone laugh, and acquaintances continued talking about his past along the path opened by the lyrics. The song still had parts left unsung. The two singers were unable to finish the remainder normally.