So we’ve all heard of body-shaming or slut-shaming? But have you heard of voice-shaming?
In my work leading choirs, school children and groups in a huge variety of singing projects what comes up again and again is that when I tell someone I meet what my job is (choir director) they invariably say: “Wow how amazing. The thing is, I can’t sing.” And when I invariably reply: “I’m sure you can - unless there’s a particular medical issue” they say “No, no, I REALLY can’t sing” before launching into their story about who told them at whatever point in their life that they can’t sing.
What is especially sad is that a lot of people’s stories about their voice-shaming experience, is that they are often from the very people whose job it is to support people on their musical development: music teachers or choir directors at school. Or sometimes from peers, or sometimes a stressful performing experience where they weren’t properly supported, had a bad experience which in turn has gone on to cripple their future singing experiences.
I conducted a very methodical (er herm) survey on my instagram account asking how many people had been voice-shamed and got an extremely high 80%. In this ultra-scientific study, I’m afraid I have no idea what the sample size was!
But it seems to me that in England where I live, the singing culture seems to be separated into those that can (which would be people with a high level of music education, probably the ability to read music and perform at a high level) and those that can’t. This is reinforced by our education system where just to pass public exams in Music GCSE or A’-Level, you will need to have had private voice/instrumental levels for a long time, to even be able to pass the exams let alone achieve a high result. There is no other subject which requires this kind of private financial support.
But, there is a happy ending to this story, in some ways. There has been an explosion in inclusive community choirs in this country, which don’t require auditions or the ability to read music. The government is finally cottoning on to the hugely positive impacts of singing and group singing in particular, and how it relates to mental and physical wellbeing and we are starting to see some social prescribing of choirs, and it would be great to see some joining up the dots so that people in every part of the country reap the benefits.
What we need now, is children and young people to have access to high quality musical experiences, irrespective of wealth or talent, to challenge the culture of those that can and those that can’t; to put an end to the voice-shaming culture which kills people’s confidence; and create communities which can reap the personal, social, community, confidence and health benefits of singing and making music together. Hopefully this would deal with the effects of voice-shaming as well as the culture of fear around singing in this country. But that is the subject of a whole new blog post…