Jill Purce

Jill Purce (born 1947) is a British voice teacher, Family Constellations therapist, and author. In the 1970s, Purce developed a new way of working with the voice, introducing the teaching of group overtone chanting, producing a single note whilst amplifying vocal harmonics. She is a former fellow of King's College London, Biophysics Department. She produced over 30 books as general editor of the Thames and Hudson Art and Imagination series. Between 1971 and 1974, she worked in Germany with the composer Karlheinz Stockhausen. Since the early 1970s, she has taught diverse forms of contemplative chant, especially overtone chanting. For over 15 years, she has been leading Family Constellations combined with chant. Purce is the author of The Mystic Spiral: Journey of the Soul, a book about the spiral in sacred traditions, art, and psychology. Background Purce was born in Staffordshire, England. Educated at Headington School, Oxford, she graduated with a BA in Fine Art from the University of Reading (1970) and Master's degrees from the Chelsea College of Art, London (1970–71), and King's College London. In a BBC documentary about her, More Ways than One: The Mystic Spiral, Purce described how, through contemplating the patterns in water, she noticed that when flow encounters resistance, first it rotates, then these rotary patterns become individual eddies which separate out as independent forms. This observation of the form-creating principle of flow, resistance, and rotation, became the basis of her research from 1968 until 1974, on the form of the spiral and the theme of the labyrinth in nature, science, art, psychology, and sacred traditions.