Edith Wiensx

Edith Wiens allowed me the rare opportunity to participate in her master class for young voices. What first struck me was Edith’s way of teaching, and more specifically how she manages to sculpt and develop voices so as to reveal their full expressive potential. In her, I discovered a true master of singing. Thanks to Edith and her students, I realized that there was a strong relationship between the musicality of the sung melodic line and the pictorality of the drawn line. I sought to transcribe the vocal power I was hearing by infusing my pastels with the energy I was feeling. She retaught me how the body’s posture and breathing could imbue the variations of drawn lines with greater vitality. The body is like a vibrating instrument, both emitter and receiver. By working it as a singer, Edith guided me toward richer and more intensely expressive lines in my painting.How did this awareness arise ? I began with a sort of topographic reading of the different voices in their dynamic aspect, via a linear script, echoing a musical score, from left to right. But I was quickly bored. My sketch resembled banal spectrographs and oscillographs. Of course, I might have made use of a series of horizontal waves, but to me that seemed more representative of the frequencies of a piano than those of song. At the same time, I felt drawn to the “phonautograph scripture” that I had come across on a visit to the Menil Collection in Houston, whose voice boomed “I’d like to go home, as it transcribed a melody of curves that, to me, evoked the lines of abstract landscapes. Attending Edith’s classes, I came to understand that the voice, by virtue of its verticality, needed to rise out of the whole body, and to be sung outward, expanding in space. As such, the dynamic phrasings of the voice seemed to be launched like a whirlwird. This circulating energy, from low to high around the vertebral column, made me think of a moving vortex, which I called a “breath column.” With this figure, the pictorial representation of the voice’s movement was drawn not only in its sequences, measures, and phrasings, but also in a dynamic and continually vibrating, vertical flux, as though expanding. Whence the idea of a column of air as a manifestation of the soul articulating the universe and its perceptible forms in song. There was an additional challenge to meet :
I needed to understand how a singer harnesses his or her reserve of energy, inhalation, exhalation, and breath, in order to imbue my pastel lines with strength and with color. Edith demonstrated immense patience in relaying to me this vocal discipline, this mystery of breathing. Indeed, one may call it a mystery, seeing as the task is to reveal the intensity and colors of fundamental sound. As Jankelevitch said,

“unlike language, music is not constrained by the need to transmit preexisting meaning that has already eroded words. It can thus touch the body directly, overwhelm it, make it dance and sing; it can magically draw man outside himself.”

I was able to understand, thanks to a series of experiments in our workshop laboratory, on a Mozart aria sung by Edith in her sublime voice, the extent to which the body is the fundamental axis in the singing of a line. The moment when breath becomes the rhythm of life is perhaps the very foundation of singing, painting, drawing, and poetry.