CANTO BRUTTO (SO EASY EVEN A CAVEMAN COULD DO IT!)

Common dialogue after a goosebump-giving performance at a voice lesson:  
Jen: That was awesome. How did it feel?
Singer: It felt great but it was kind of ugly.  
Jen: Can you describe how you’d like it to sound?
Singer: It probably is what it should sound like but it still feels ugly.
Jen: Do you think it FEELS gross or it SOUNDS ugly.
Singer: It sounds ugly.

This is my short response:  We kind of are making ugly noises.   But it’s also what the song calls for.  
This is my long response:  Why are we so worried about sounding ugly anyway?  Believe it or not, our fears date way back to The Stone Age. Here’s what I mean.

IN THE PAST!:

We were the only species in the Animal Kingdom that sang AND lived on land.  Birds and monkeys sang but they could hide in trees.  Whales sang but they were safe under the ocean.  Way back then, we didn’t have the luxury of living in natural habitats that hid us from our enemies.  We were right there in the open.  In prehistoric times, if you broke out into your favorite Whitney Houston song while cleaning your cave, your voice would be heard all over the jungle and the Smoke Monster would know exactly where to find you.  So it’s a very natural instinct to feel vulnerable while singing your tunes even millions of years later.  The cavewoman in you knows you shouldn’t be singing that loudly. 
But in 2013 our predators are no longer lions, tigers or bears... they’re critics, friends, audiences, teachers, parents and, sadly, ourselves.  Now we’re more afraid of being eaten alive by our fellow Homo sapiens than by wild animals.

Unfortunately using clubs to bludgeon our haters is considered illegal today, so the only thing we’ve got are these:  confidence in our instincts and an uninhibited sense of abandon.   You’ve seen America’s Next Top Model.  You see how those girls are willing to pose in coffins with tarantulas on their faces for the sake of the shot?  They recognize that something that looks highly disgusting can also be high fashion and that’s why they’re the best.  They’re turning their “ugly” into something that will be accepted as pretty because underneath it they are motivated and confident.

WE LOVE UGLY!:

Because singing is a natural thing that began millions of years ago, it would make sense that it wasn’t originally meant to be that pretty. We used song to communicate because we just didn’t have the mental capacity to have formal languages yet.  Everybody sang.  It wasn’t a special talent.  But as time passed and our brains became more sophisticated, those sounds we were making were omitted from our vocabulary because they were too cray cray.  That’s when people started being judgey and deciding who was allowed to sing and who should keep their day job.  And those who were deemed untalented had to resort to words as their penance.  And words, tools that are supposed to allow us to articulate exactly what we mean in a very specific way, can ironically be so confining and frustrating and not specific enough!  Sometimes there just isn’t a word for how we’re feeling and we just want to make a noise!  When we’re in pain, when we’re scared, when we’re disgusted, when we think something is funny, we use sounds that aren’t found in the dictionary.  We need to give ourselves permission to use these crude noises in the context of a polished product even if it feels counterintuitive.  These are the sounds our audiences are wishing they could use themselves but society is telling them they’re too good for it and they’re not allowed.  Deep down, all of us really just want to lay in coffins with tarantulas on our faces.  No?  Ok...  We need to be confident enough to unlace our vocal corsets and run bra-less on stage so that our audiences can praise Jesus for some vicarious release.  Yes, I said it.  (Because that’s what we REALLY want and you know it.)

Guys, listen. We’re in Musical Theater. The whole point of a musical is that the character just can’t express what she wants to express unless she sings it.  Should we limit ourselves to the mundane sounds we use every day when we’re ordering a chicken sandwich?  Absolutely not!  Singing is the time to reach into your primal souls and pull out what’s in there and trust that, inherently, because you’re humans and descendants of cavemen, you’ll succeed in the Mix and Match Game of Paleolithic Sounds to Paleolithic Feelings.  You know instinctively how to depict these feelings in a simple way because we were once... well... simpler.  After all, Cavemen felt these things first: Desire, Fear, Sadness, Aggression, Joy. . .  and when they expressed themselves they didn’t worry whether it was aesthetically pleasing to the people around them.

UNTRAINING YOUR TRAINED BRAIN:

We take so many classes to learn how to be “organic” and “raw” actors.  We need to trust and remember that some of the most organic things we’ve seen on stage and screen are brilliant because they’re freakin’ ugly!  We literally give out awards for something called The Ugly Cry.  Viola Davis: boogers galore in Doubt.  Did we care? No.  Oscar.   Even Anne Hathaway could have used a Kleenex when filming I Dreamed a Dream and she won the Oscar before the movie came out.  We need to take some of the same values we work towards in our acting classes and bring them into our singing lives, too.  These women have been training for years but when push comes to shove we don’t want to see the training; we want to see how the training helped them to be as raw as hell.  These performers have enough experience to know how far to push themselves emotionally before they start hyperventilating, yelling “Cut!”, killing co-stars, etc.  The same should apply to vocals.  We can keep our training in the back of our minds to protect ourselves from getting injured, but we also can do what feels right in the moment even if it’s ugly and trust that we know what we’re doing because we practiced the pretty stuff.

Let’s switch gears.  Food for thought:  Who are the most careless, raw and untrained people on Earth?  Babies. Grown men have been known to reduce themselves to goo-goo-ga-ga-ing just for some sort of reaction from a baby.

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If we’re willing to lose our dignity and produce high-pitched, nonsensical sounds just to connect with an infant (who can’t possibly afford to give us a paycheck, by the way), why not make this sacrifice for our audiences, too?  Aren’t we looking for a visceral response from those people, as well?

If it’s character driven and connected, it’s not “just screaming” or “ugly” or “silly.”  Even Idina Menzel says her vocal inspiration for Elphaba was literally Margaret Hamilton’s laugh from the Wizard of Oz movie.  What could be more ugly than that?  But that’s what got her a Tony.  It was character appropriate, controlled and motivated.

If you still don’t believe me, look at this video I made just for you.  Out of context, the climaxes of these songs sound crazy!

These girls are basically yelling, crying, screaming, etc. in a controlled, musical context and that’s why we take voice lessons anyway, right? -- to learn how to make weird sounds in a controlled musical context.

Life isn’t always pretty so our voices shouldn’t always be pretty either.  Don’t deny yourself your humanity.  Be an animal. Sing some gross notes. I leave you with this: