Voice Emergent

Voice Emergent was founded by Barclay McMillan in 1991. He offered courses and singing gatherings in Ottawa until his passing at the age of 87 on November 2, 2019. Barclay’s LifeSong program, the subject of a feature length documentary, continues to be offered by Chris MacLean who was his associate for the five years before his death. Barclay was widely loved and respected for his ability to create opportunities for people to discover, or recover, their singing voices and explore them in a context of healing and well-being.

“When we learned to speak, we gained symbols that could communicate emotion without our necessarily having to feel it. As Paul Newham, the world’s leading authority on the psychology of the voice and one of my teachers puts it, ‘When God gave humankind the gift of speech he gave us a language of the mind and we took it in celebration and delight. But in our excitement we came to forget the song of the heart.’ To reach our potential as speakers we need to get back that song.” –Barclay McMillan

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