Featuring: Honey Novick
Bio:
Honey Novick is a singer/songwriter/voice teacher/poet. She sings in languages that include Yiddish, Hebrew, Japanese, Spanish, French, Italian, one song in Mandarin and Urdu when singing harmony with SAMA' Music. She sings in styles that range from semi-classical, folk, jazz, religious music as well as pop and children’s music. In 2010 Honey won the Bobbi Nahwegahbow Memorial Award, and a full membership to the League of Canadian Poets. Honey is a SOCAN member and director of the Creative Vocalization Studio, song facilitator at Sheena’s Place (a support place for people with eating disorders) and music consultant to the Friendly Spike Theatre Band, a community-based, artist run theatre of people living with disabilities and survivor/consumers of the psychiatric system.
Interview:
1. Do you think music can be used as a medium to bring about a positive change in the society you live in? how so?
Music must be used to bring positive change to society because music is the language of the spirit and music connects people to their own spirit and then outwardly to the spirit of friends, family and the greater society. Music is the language of humanism. Music expresses happiness and sorrow. When one sings or plays an instrument and is sincere in the delivery of that song, that sincerity reaches the heart of people whether they speak the same words (language) or not.
2. What role does creativity play in your life? how do you nurture it?
Creativity is the ability to “make something from nothing”. When I need to entertain myself or others, I create a song, poem, story or offering of food. It is another way of making a new friend, or connection. I nurture it by taking risks sometimes. I dare to think differently, go somewhere I’ve never been before and speak to someone I don’t as yet know. It is difficult. It’s easier to be comfortable, familiar, non-venturing. I always try to re-invent myself, to grow, to be “au courant”, to take “calculated risks” and see what happens from ‘nothing ventured, nothing gained”.
3. When and how did you begin to use your music to help those with disability?
Several years ago, David Walsh suggested me to RuthRuth Stackhouse of the Friendly Spike Theatre. When she invited me to sing with her group at City Hall, a great partnership was born. I had been very influenced by a former accompanist, whose brother-in-law had cerebral palsy, observing their relationship influenced me deeply. I hear sounds differently than a lot of musicians/singers and hear a “beauty” in the slurred sound, the cadence, the unusual, the off-key, the “ugly”. My friend, a social worker, was looking to help a young woman who could only move her head but who loves to sing. As a “chance”, I was recommended and the partnership really worked. This quadriplegic woman who breathes through a ventilator wound up singing the Disability Anthem (music by me and words by Paulos Iannou) for the Lt. Governor and performing with the theatre and in several festivals.
4. What inspires you to continue to work with music to create a positive change?
The necessity of loving what I do, the integrity and idealism of being true to my art, the desire to live happily and the dream of peace. When I see children metamorphose from distrust to giggling, when I sing a silly song or tell a sad story and then make it possible for them to try, that keeps me going. Recently at the Metro Toronto Movement for Literacy conference, I presented VOICE YOGA and a woman came up to me to report that when she arrived, she was depressed and after my session, she was uplifted. That sort of thing inspires me. Love inspires me.
5 How do you manage to balance your professional career and your involvement with community?
I don’t see any difference between my career and my community involvement. My life is expressed in my music, of course, as well as in my friends, my life style, my choice of foods and books and movies and clothing colours and textures and in being able to express my bliss in “being drunk on the fragrance of lilacs and lindens and lilies of the valleys under a stormy sky or blue cloudless firmament”.
6. Which sources and people do you draw your inspirations from?
Growing up Jewish, almost everything I do stems from that, including having a great sense of social justice and awareness of fair play and democracy and gratitude for being alive and speaking out against injustice. My parents loved opera and rabbinical music and folk music and popular songs and we sang a lot and listened to the radio and recorded music and danced in the kitchen. Working at the Mariposa Folk Festival, I was introduced to a Cree Family who have become like my own family and their music, philosophy, politics and culture has affected me greatly. I am a member of the Soka Gakkai International (Society for the Creation of Value), a Japanese Buddhist lay organization that has taught me what being a human being is – from the potential to create peace through culture and education to making friends and working with people from every walk of life. I’ve learned to embrace my own imperfections and be more patient and compassionate while trying to learn about wisdom and kindness and latitude. Communicating with the Japanese people when neither of us spoke the same language but each equally determined to work together in the name of peace is how I am able to continue doing what I do. Also, SGI members are taught the meaning of the mentor/disciple relationship and how applying that to daily life gets us through the most difficult times of no faith, self-doubt, and lack of confidence. When I was a very little girl, my parents owned a house. We took in boarders. One family that came to live with us was a mother and son. He was a nationally admired violinist who experienced a mental breakdown and was hospitalized and given shock treatments. When he was released, they came to live with us. The stigma attached to his illness was a profound experience for me. Another family that lived with us was a mother, father and 2 children. The father had been jailed for his political views and when he was released, they needed a place to live. Later on another family came to live with us. They were religious fanatics who hated everybody that was different. Fortunately they didn’t stay long but their intensity left its lesson in my psyche. One young woman from Canada’s Maritime provinces lived with us and taught me country and western music that I still love. In secondary school, my best friend was a gay young man. Our conversations, adventures and love of jazz, motown and broadway music is in my DNA. As a young woman, I experienced kidney failure and was slowly dying. Through that 2 and a half year journey, I began to value the meaning of life and the fulfillment of being alive. I’m influenced by many people and places and life’s experiences.
7. Your voice is your tool. How do you maintain and nurture it?
I sing a lot. I listen very carefully not only to the sound of my voice but to its instrument (my body) as well. I listen to the “shapes and colours” of my sound. I understand that singing is the confluence of breath, the way the body moves, how it is built and how it is treated. I sing with other people and listen to those sounds and feelings. I laugh as much as I can and that releases stressors in the throat as does yawning, but laughter is easier. I am aware of the relationship between my spine and the right and left side of my body. I place my body’s weight on my feet in a way that bears my bodyweight and allows me to move easily and controls the “instrument”. I do this all day long, from driving to watching TV to actually practising abdominal breathing and VOICE YOGA (c. H. Novick). I sing into a mirror and watch my face and its muscles and bones and lines. I try not to be too hard on myself for mistakes. It’s hard to be self-forgiving but it is imperative and allows the voice to be authentic.
8. What are some of the ways by which we can make our surroundings and environment more positive and creative?
What we value is how we live. That is my philosophy in a nutshell. How mindful are we as individuals? I think poetry is the most valuable commodity we can invest in. Poetry speaks for us in beauty and imagination and allows us to express ourselves. I think teaching children to offer opinions and take musical risks, like making ugly sounds, is important. I think dreaming and being idealists is the most difficult, yet dignified way of living.
Visit Honey Novick's website
Have you been inspired by someone who has brought a positive change or made a positive difference on a macro or a micro level?
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