Cumie Dunio opens every workshop with the same sentence: the fastest and gentlest way to bring breath, heartbeat and nerves back into step is to sing one long, slow vowel. You do not need to be able to sing. You need to be able to breathe out.
Sand on a plate, and one held note. Scattered, then a sound, then order. Move the note and watch it find a new shape. Cumie brings one of these to her sessions so people can see what their own voice does to matter — including the matter they are made of.
La veu que acaricia l’ànima
If you have never done anything like this, this is the gentlest possible first time. You take a chair or bring a mat, in the courtyard of a seventeenth-century Palma palace, and for an evening a voice and instruments from around the world do the rest. Nothing is asked of you.
An intimate tapestry of original songs, mantras, chants and melodies in English, Spanish, Mallorquín and more languages, through Cumie's voice, overtone singing and an eclectic array of instruments from around the world. Live soundscapes and improvisation weave in and out of the music, so that each moment becomes something new.
Capacity is limited, and the courtyard holds fewer people than the palace suggests.
A chest that has been slightly tight since a point you can't name. A head that narrates and will not stop. Whole days of talking, and never once hearing your own voice do anything else. The sense of being several people who don't quite meet. And underneath it, a wish — not dramatic, just persistent — to feel like one thing again, and to feel that you belong somewhere.
People arrive at Cumie's sessions having tried the obvious things. Yoga that helped until it didn't. An app with a calm voice. A weekend away that wore off by Wednesday. Almost none of them arrive thinking the answer has anything to do with sound, let alone with a sound they would make themselves. Often it is someone capable — someone who runs things — who suspects there is more in her than she has yet found a door to. Most come nervous about their voice and wanting it anyway. Yoga teachers come for a steadier voice to speak and chant with. Now and then a professional singer comes to watch another professional do something differently.
Then they hold one long, low note with thirty other people, and something in the chest gives way, and the head goes quiet for the first time in weeks. It is not mysterious. It is what a body does when it finally gets to do this.
That is the whole discovery, and the reason it lasts when other things wear off. Cumie does lead sound baths and private sessions where you simply lie down and receive — but even those end with a recording of the hour in your hands, and everything she teaches points the same way: back to the instrument you already carry. Your voice is with you in the car, in the kitchen, in the bad week. Nobody has to give it back to you, and it costs nothing to use.
Nobody here is auditioning. The most common thing people say before a first session is that they were told, once, by someone, that they couldn't sing — usually at about seven — and it has been sitting there ever since. It has almost nothing to do with whether the voice works. A long held vowel is closer to stretching than to performance. Nobody sings alone unless they want to.
What people notice, in the order they usually notice it: the breath slows and drops lower in the body; the chest warms and loosens; the head goes quiet; the heartbeat settles; they sleep unusually well that night; the speaking voice is steadier the next day. A month later the reports change character. They have become braver with their voice, and it has stopped being a big deal: they sing the workshop's songs with their families, in the car, in the kitchen; some play her recordings to their children to get them making things. That is the result the whole page is for.
Cumie spent twenty-five years finding out what a voice can do, three years in the Zulma Reyo School of Consciousness in Mallorca learning how to better attune to life, and is now some months into the Advanced Frequency Medicine course of the acoustic researcher John Stuart Reid, on the healing powers of sound, light and water. What she teaches is the part you can take home.
Three minutes of it, so you know who will be in the room.
Her phrase, and the title of half her workshops. Below, what people wrote afterwards — five stars from thirty-nine reviews on Google, quoted as they left them.
It sounded — and felt — like I was being sung, rather than singing.
I never thought you could reach an energetic state similar to meditation simply by singing. It's extraordinary.
Three hours of rhythms, laughter, voices, sensations, goosebumps — and above all the pleasure of feeling yourself flowing freely together with the rest, forming just one individual.
Thanks to Cumie I found my true voice back, and I love to sing deeply and loud with no shame wherever I go.
I felt comfortable trying things I don't usually do, guided by Cumie.
I am now singing at every opportunity. A brilliant and clear teacher, explaining in English and Castellano at once.
Highly professional in both planning and execution. I discovered different sensations on a physical and emotional level. I'd definitely do it again.
Her technical expertise is a great benefit to the participants — they receive all the audio recorded during the workshop afterwards.
The first thing Cumie teaches in every room, written down so you can try it before you decide anything. Sit somewhere you won't be interrupted.
That is toning, and it is the root of everything else here. More of this — with Cumie's voice to follow, and the next steps — goes to the list first.
Four of these you can have today. One goes on sale in November. One opens in December. All of them end with something you take home.
Active, €60 — an hour to eighty-five minutes using your own voice as the instrument, and a recording of the session afterwards to bring the body back to it. Passive, €80 — you lie down and receive a private, personal concert from her voice, opened with twenty-five minutes of Access Bars. The recording is yours.
Cumie spends hours composing and recording a piece of music for you or for someone you love, with distance healing as part of the making. She needs a name, a place, a birthdate if you have it, and a few photographs. What arrives is a finished piece of music that exists for one person only.
Still most of what she does, and the format people ask for again: the room warms up together with a few simple exercises, then lies down for a concert in which Cumie moves through the space with her voice and instruments from around the world, giving each person a moment of their own, and closes as a group. Write to her with a date and a room.
Meditation music, lullabies, overtone singing, and the tribal-fusion dance records. Two albums for €12 as downloads, or €20 on a USB key; six for €33, or €50 on a key. She always slips in a few extra songs, and more than one parent plays them to their children to get them making things. Until the shop opens, write to her and she sends them.
Four weeks, one evening a week, a group small enough that Cumie hears everyone. From a first held note to a second pitch inside your own voice, and a practice you can keep on your own. No singing of any kind assumed.
A small yearly membership for the people who want to stay close. It is a room, not a subscription: the deeper material, ten years of her recordings, a member price on everything she does, and the members' own singing groups in their own cities. A year of it comes with any ticket to something she does in person.
Some of what people come for cannot be done alone: being one voice inside a chord held by forty strangers, and feeling for the length of a breath that you are part of something larger than yourself, and that it is holding. Twice a year, Cumie brings that to a few cities — a spring week in Europe, an autumn fortnight on the east coast of the United States. Dates go to the list first.
Sessions are built from a set of practices Cumie has been assembling for twenty-five years; a given evening uses four or five of them. The tone is light and often funny, and then, for a stretch, entirely serious, while something is held long enough to change. She explains things simply — the esoteric made grounded — and the simple things turn out to have a great deal inside them. You don't need to know any of this to come. Everyone goes home with printed sheets and the recording of their own group, so it keeps working on Tuesday.
Wear something comfortable. Children are welcome. If you can't do the movement work, there is always another way in.
Cumie Carol Dunio is an American singer, songwriter, producer and percussionist, born in Pennsylvania and living in Sa Pobla, Mallorca. She sings in more than twenty-five languages, and has spent a working life finding out what a voice can be made to do.
None of the list below is the point of the work. It is the reason to believe her about yours.
The concerts, the online group and the city weekends or retreats in nature go to the list before anywhere else. One message a month at most, and none of it is a sales funnel.
Nothing is sent to anyone else. Leave whenever you like.
For private sessions, festivals, retreats and venue bookings, write directly.
cumie@cumie.com +34 687 656 356
