‘What sound does my body make?” is a question that has followed Briony Greenhill since she was a child in Suffolk, sitting and singing on the stairs of the family home. It’s there today in her work as one of the world’s leading proponents of collaborative vocal improvisation (CVI) and in the power and intimacy of her new album, Crossing the Ocean. “These voices that we have are part of our human design,” she says. “There’s a beauty in bringing that out and making music with it.”
Vocal improvisation is different to other forms of singing. There is no song, no score, no lyrics. “When you’re not given a song, and you end up learning to trust the song that comes through you in the moment, it’s like finding the rubber ring you can trip down the river on,” Greenhill says.
In CVI, groups improvise together. “You’re a channel for the music, the moment, the air. I’m grounded and I’m hollow, and these bigger energies are coming through me. You’re allowing the song to use you as a vessel.”
As a child, Greenhill took singing lessons that moulded her voice to fit pop, jazz and musical theatre styles, which she describes as “putting these techniques on to my voice from outside”. At 20, she met a woman who was teaching the basics of Indian classical vocals at a festival. “You just sing one note,” she says. “You can do it for an hour – it’s a vocal meditation.” It was “about breathing feeling into your body”. Finding this technique calming, Greenhill started doing it most days.
During a decade in which Greenhill studied political science and worked for thinktanks and NGOs, music took a backseat: she played singer-songwriter gigs around London and took occasional session work. At almost 30, she felt something needed to change and she travelled to India, where she attended a classical violin concert that would prove transformative.
There was something in the violinist’s unstructured, improvised playing that reminded Greenhill of the joy she had found singing as a child. After the concert, she asked if he would be her music teacher. “Well, I teach violin,” he said. “But I want to be your teacher, so I’m going to pretend you’re a violin and get on with it.”
Learning to sing like a violin was liberating. “What I’ve found often in music education as a singer is that you don’t get treated like a musician,” says Greenhill. “It’s about lyrics, appearance, your vibe. It’s not about music theory the way it is for instrumentalists. But in India I studied melody and rhythm like a violinist, I asked my voice to find a higher standard of agility and precision and musical excellence.”
Greenhill continued her studies in France, under David Eskenazy, and in the US with Bobby McFerrin and the vocalist and performance artist Rhiannon. “It was like ‘Learn Bach preludes in C! Transcribe Wes Montgomery guitar solos and then just sing them!’” she says. “And that was thrillingly next-level.”
It can be hard to let go into this way of working. In the making of Crossing the Ocean, Greenhill collaborated with several classically trained musicians – including the composer Simon Dobson – and was struck by how cerebral their music seemed. “Because that’s not where this music comes from – it comes from the body.”
Later this year, Greenhill will launch the UK’s first CVI festival. She has already produced a vocal improvisation app, Your Song, and regularly leads courses in the UK and California. “At the start, everyone is nervous,” she says. “But I feel like I have the best job, because people’s voices are so beautiful. They’re this rich garden with all these different plants and flowers in it. And often through fear, or lack of use, those flowers get hidden. So I feel like a gardener. And I have tools and methods to help the flowers come out.”
There are often tears. “People go a funny colour and keel over sideways, because the voice is down there quite deep in the heart,” Greenhill says. “I think our modern life is so busy and pressurised, and you just carry on. But when you don’t carry on, and you reach inside for your voice, what comes up with it are things you’ve been pushing down in order to carry on. So you can excavate some of the grief that’s in the heart.”
Last summer, Greenhill found herself back in California, singing in collaboration for the first time since the start of the pandemic. It brought up her own grief, of course, but it was a homecoming, too. “Being back on stage, and being back with people, and singing again …” she says, “I realised I had forgotten who I was. I had forgotten why I’m alive.”
