When I sing solo, as in my sets usually, for me it is about living the song (easy, as they are mine) and allowing myself to feel, and project, the emotions it generates in me. I use those emotions to dress the story it tells, so that I become like an actor. I try to avoid "overacting" though, using voice and eyes/eyebrows mostly. Projection is important, and so is volume, as long as it doesn't get in the way of the storytelling or run counter to the emotions at the time. Like an actor, I am offering rather than sharing.

But when I sing harmony it is almost the total opposite. I sang in several choirs throughout my life, from when I was 12, but the last choir I was a member of (Athens Experimental Choir) marked my singing from then on in many ways, too complex to explain here. It had developed a very definite "ethos" for singing generally and choir-singing in particular. It involved listening to the other voices and blending, aiming at the effect of a single, unworldly, voice. If you couldn't hear the third person down the line from you, you were too loud. You alternated your breathing with the others in your section to give a continuous effect. You used your stomach mussles in a rolling motion to give "wave" effects (on video you could see each section undulating as a single body, as we produced the same "wave" simultaneously).

We got it right 1 time out of 50 at first, then 1 out of 10, and at the end 1 out of 4 or 5 was the best we could get. The "failures" were still very listenable, and audiences enjoyed them. But the "successes" were unearthly, they made your hackles rise and set your teeth on edge. You knew you were singing, but could not hear your own voice, nor distinguish anyone else's in your section. You were but a molecule in something bigger.

Our highest achievement in front of an audience was in the Kennedy Centre: We stationed 6 mini-quintets (one member from each section) around the auditorium to sing a particular medley, and despite the huge distance between the mini-choirs, the members of each section blended with each other across the auditorium. The effect for the audience was that the sound seemed to come from above, not from any particular direction in the horizontal.

That was sharing, all right, of the like I have rarely experienced since. But when I harmonise with someone, that is what I am aiming for. And now and then, the tingle comes...