Wounded healer

Mum and Dad

Neither the changes of her career, nor the twists and turns of her life suggest that she would be the type of person wanting to sing since she was babe in arms. She has had no singing lessons, she did not go through any education or training in this branch. She studied cello at the Conservatory and then she worked in the theater “Husa na Provázku”. She didn’t do this so much out of love for the theater, but rather because of at that time very independent, vagrant lifestyle the theater provided. With the voice capacity, granted to her by God, and musical ear – she would sit at “dissident’s parties” at the piano and sing. People want to sing the way she does. In a few years she will start to teach them. A decision, based on her momentary situation in life rather than on long-lasting and tenacious climb toward a dreamt-up ambition. This woman does not consider a major turning point in her career encounter with some important music producer or composer, but the death of her father.

When my father died, I could not cry, but I sang. And I have sung since then. He always used to tell me: Open your throat, open your heart, don’t be scared of anything and sing.
I.K.

Ida was born to Ludmila and Koloman Bitto in 1956 in Bruntál. A daughter of a teacher in nursery school and a double-bass player. She considers her parents to be the greatest teachers and sources of inspiration in her life. In them she recognizes two opposite ways of dealing with one’s own power (emotion).

Mother. According to Ida an energetic and domineering person. Without any inhibitions she used to fully express her attitudes and thus she “killed all those around her”. In childhood she missed the expressions of her mother’s love, she missed her hugs and understanding. This she found with her father. Until now she is in conflict with her mother as regard the Roma origin of her father. (Ida’s mother denies that her husband was of Roma origin).

Father. Sensitive and introverted father “stifled” emotions inside himself and thus “was killing himself”. He lead Ida to music.

As simply as this and as extremely as this she viewed the two ways she did not want to take in life. But where to find the third one, the “right one, her own” way? How to deal with the fire of one’s own emotions in such a way, so as not to burn oneself and others, and at the same time not to burn out? She found the answer for this question in her work. We could say that she discovered herself through her work..

Ida’s way of opening and discovering human voice is not motivated by attempts to achieve technical perfection. It is not an effort to sing more beautifully, more strongly or better. Singing and feeling the song is only a pretext for searching for that voice in a human being, which no one else will ever hear. The voice, leading us back to our own emotions. It is primarily there where Ida finds the fundamental source of life and human creativity. We can call the voice intuition, we can give it some other name. The important thing is, that everybody finds out for himself.

Joj mamo

To sing means to hear a voice which no one else can hear. Listening means to hear a voice the singer does not hear.
I.K.

For many, Joj mamo is the hymn among the songs in Ida’s repertoire. Most of us can probably recall it as a worn-out gypsy song. In her rendering, ignoring original rhythmic arrangement, the song becomes an expression of great longing for motherly hug, a desperate cry for love and faith. In the voice of an adult woman we can hear the tenacious pain of a child. It is a cry, projected into the tones of a simple melody. The listener is no longer interested in the original framework of the melody, he is drawn in the center by personal confession of another human being. As if she was saving her life with this song, as if she wasn’t able to sing it till the end. Death and passion, beating heart, show their presence in this song.

Any song, in her rendering, becomes a dramatic situation in the most exalted sense of the word. In the sad ones she usually alternates expressions of suffocating tension and inner conflict with liberating, to full depth sung tones of the chorus, which can have almost a therapeutic effect on the listener. What can we compare this to? In our culture, such, in good sense of the word, theatrical and eccentric display is probably most likely to resemble a flamenco singer, because of the very risky way of dealing with the voice and the emotional investment. The expressiveness of stylization exceeds the boundaries of conventional singer expression esthetics not only in case of this song.

Her singing often evokes a plea, a cry, a surrender, longing. Her voice opens up in space like fire.

This singing does not want to be pleasant, maybe therefore it is so desperately alive. It represents constant transformation of personal pain. I heard not only this song in her rendering number of times and it always felt as fresh as a flower. Ida, singing “Joj mamo” for the thousandth time works similarly as an actor, embodying identical situation in reruns. The tones and the melody are the same – it is the same bed, but the river running in it is different and new each time. The river of transformed emotion here and now. Thus she heals herself and in this way she can heal also others, who listen to her.

The urgency of her statement is probably closely connected with the fact that she gives only that which she herself went through and experienced.