Lament: a ritual of letting go (part 1)
Ashes and Alchemy
This is the first in a little series of essays documenting the development over the next few months of a very particular and personal project, ‘Lament: a ritual of letting go’.
This project was supposed to be my swan song. In 2022 I reached the end of myself. I discovered where my limits were, in terms of the endless pressure to rise to the challenges of those unpredictable, gruelling, stop-start pandemic years, and I was pulled up short. Suddenly, for the first time, I felt I couldn’t continue performing. But I didn’t have an alternative career plan so I made a deal with myself: make space for a sabbatical, in the hope that I could recover something from the ashes, whilst simultaneously planning for a gloriously dramatic [sound of swishing cape] retirement at the end of the 2024-25 season. Which is now. And yet...
We don’t sing laments in my culture anymore. Beyond ‘Happy birthday to you’, the national anthem and the odd Christmas carol, how many songs could you sing spontaneously and communally? We scarcely make use of communal music-making even to mark the big transitions of life, preferring to employ professional musicians or a sound system to create the bombast of a big wedding or the solemnity of a funeral rather than trilling our own songs. How much less do we Brits use our voice to process those intimate, private moments of joy or grief. It wasn’t all that long ago that we had both a shared repertoire (folk songs, drinking songs; jazz standards, too) and shared spaces in which to sing (pubs, front rooms, churches and chapels), but the opportunity — the urge, even — to express and process spontaneous and deep-seated emotion through song is rare. Football matches and rock or pop concerts are wonderful examples of hearty communal singing, but there the event is the ritual (Adoration of the Fandom), and the songs are carefully curated. Many of us are estranged from our own voices.
I’ve been a professional singer for only one year less than I’ve been singing formally which, I realise now, has led to my relationship with my own voice being quite earnest: I’ve had to take this singing thing seriously from the get-go, developing more of a perfectionist attitude than a playful one. Reaching the end of myself meant having to turn around and assess the state of affairs. It was in this state of blockage that I became fascinated by the lament. It wasn’t a rational thing. It wasn’t a ‘research topic’, it was a life raft. I couldn’t articulate any of this very clearly at the time but now I would say that I was trying to let go of the ‘art’ of song (of me serving the art) and find liberation through lament. That has been a slow and painful process, but through the grieving — of crooked expectations, withering dreams and one, dear-departed friend — I have found a way forward. I have keened my way back into song.
This project is not about grief. It can hold that (yours or mine) but it has become a tentative celebration of vocality, in all its varied, expressive power. I have written elsewhere about the extraordinary vocal flexibility required of a new-music singer, and it is this opportunity to be a musical chameleon that I love so much about what I do, and yet recently I have found myself wanting to employ this flexibility in a different way. I am trying to reduce the gap between me and the music, I think. I am craving a simpler vocal expression, perhaps; maybe less ‘artful’? We draw such hard lines around musical territories. Training and experience tend to narrow the field rather than broaden it, delineating fiercely what one ‘should’ sing and how one ‘should’ sing it. Perhaps I am craving the freedom to roam, the freedom to explore, the freedom to play. All these metaphors of land... Perhaps there is also a desire to escape, just for a moment, the historical, intellectual and cultural heft of Classical Music in favour of something much more earthy.
This project is not about nostalgia. I am not attempting to turn back the clock to the days of yore in search of some faded tradition. Quite the opposite, in fact, since I want to find out what it means to lament in a way that is grounded in the here and now. I’m interested in how historical resources can serve contemporary needs; how the personal can serve the communal; how emotion can be channelled freely through the body; how an oddly specific vision can create a shared moment of alchemy.
And what we’ll share eventually is no longer my ritual but one shaped by the laments and, more presciently, the desires of my collaborators. There has been much letting-go to be done along the way, for this has been a project bedevilled by niggling hitches, but when we finally gathered as an ensemble for the first time (at the beginning of March, for a three-day residency hosted by Britten Pears Arts), something wild and magical was unleashed. It takes courage and open-heartedness to walk into a space in which you know you will be asked to put aside your training and leap into the unknown. Christelle, Sarah, Eliza and Soosan have amazed me.
It's difficult to describe for you a project that is still finding its form. I’m not convinced, though, that a lot of detail would serve our aims: isn’t mystery inherent to any ritual? I can tell you about the music we’re exploring — very early music by Kassia (Byzantine hymns from the ninth century), early music by Josquin and Couperin, folk songs from around the place, and brand-new laments composed by Soosan Lolavar and James Weeks — and I can tell you that we’re exploring it with playfulness, passion and even irreverence. For in building this ritual we have pledged to let go of notions of perfectionism and orderliness, and we have declared that nothing is off-limits. There is lusty ensemble singing; there is a sequence of movement untouched by choreographic expertise; together we are side-stepping our habits of ‘performance’ in search of an embodied state of lament. The journey is underway and the ritual is unfolding. What I can promise you is something strange and beautiful, and you are most welcome to share in it.
‘Lament: a ritual of letting go’ will first be performed at the Aldeburgh Festival on 21 June 2025 (a late-night show on the longest day of the year) and at Klangspuren Festival in Schwaz, Austria, on 13 September 2025.
In the next essay, I’ll be exploring the wider cultural significance of the lament. But don’t get used to anything too frequent — I’m not planning to love-bomb Substack. I write when I want to, and I hope to remain unpredictable.
this sounds absolutely beautiful