The film Resonance follows private lessons conducted by three prominent voice and singing teachers in Germany, depicting their relationship with one of their students throughout a whole semester. While working on the physical aspect of the voice, a sensuous closeness is being created between the teacher and the student. Since music is an emotional enunciation, both teachers and students are being exposed during the lessons. The film utilizes this environment in order to inspect the voice and the way it functions in communication between humans, how it affords a means of expression, and creates a connection which is beyond words – physical and sensual.

Music can trigger the deepest and most secret emotions in us, be a physical, mental or spiritual experience – for the musicians who create it, too. Aspiring singers take private lessons to reach the highest level of classical singing. The film follows three renowned voice and singing teachers and their students over the course of a semester. It is tough physical training, hours of practice, breathing, finding the exactly right positions of tongue and jaws. Because ultimately the magic of extreme emotionality can be produced only on the basis of technical perfection, by pouring ones personality into it, by an interplay of effort and the ability to let go. Though we learn little about the singers, listening primarily to their voices, we feel the intensity and intimacy that arises between teacher and student in these kinds of private lessons – an atmosphere in which something great, transcendent is being built. The light and usually quiet concrete building of one of the three music academies visited by Itay Marom for his film seems almost like a Zen monastery.

Frederik Lang, DOK Leipzig