Another Friday
Fridays are always a monster because it’s both Music Lesson and Sacred Home Tower Bell Practise. Today was further confounded, compounded, confused and flummoxed by Weather.
I heard it tipping it down in buckets last night. I know it’s all cosy and everything to lie snugly in bed and listen to Weather happening on the other side of the window,* but I tend to peer at the clock, calculate how many hours before I will be wanting to hurtle hellhounds again, and wonder how long the sleet, hail and thunderbolts are going to go on for. And Friday mornings tend to be my second-earliest** falling out of bed days because I want to get down to the mews as early as possible in the hope of having several delicious, semi-illicit hours at the piano, the computer, and frelling Finale. There have certainly been weeks when everything has gone to hell with a bang and a clatter and I’m frantically trying to scratch something together on Friday morning to make it worth Oisin’s time to have me infesting his space***. But it is likelier that I’m hustling down to the mews as fast as I can because Fridays are such a good excuse to spend extra time on music. Oh, but I wanted to finish the seventh symphony and the first act of the opera, the song cycle and the concerto for bagpipe, sho, and singing bowls for today!
But first I have to get hellhounds dashed and blasted. That first half an hour out of bed in the morning† is not a happy time. They could be re-enacting the battle of Thermopylae in the street under my window†† and I would only be thinking, blurrily, I know my over-the-road neighbour has a houseful of teenagers, but this is extreme. So the weather doesn’t really penetrate††† at first. The shadows cast by rapidly moving fat black clouds only make me worry about my eyesight and the bellowing of King Leonidas is only someone arguing with his girlfriend.
The first time hellhounds and I ventured out in what looked like a gap in the weather I hadn’t even got the door locked before the rain started up (or down) again like someone putting a firehose over the rooftree and aiming at our heads. Hellhounds hate the rain, and take it personally: there’s not a lot of point in trying to dash and blast them through heavy rain unless you enjoy shouting and yanking. So we grappled our way through the Spartans to Wolfgang and went down to the mews immediately.
This was not to the hellhounds’ taste either. We want a walk, they said. We want a hurtle. Will you please turn the water off and take us out? I have never really learned to believe in the hellhounds’ astonishing sphincter control so I told Finale to save, and took them out for necessary eliminatory purposes—they having refused to avail themselves of the cottage garden because of the weather—we lasted about a quarter of an hour and I gave up and brought them in again. It’s raining, guys, I said. I control the cooking of chicken‡, the filling of water bowls, and the closing and opening of doors: I do not, contrary to these clear indications, control the universe. Hellhounds semi-subsided, grumbling.
This week I have spent insane amounts of time trying to put frelling dynamics into the Silly Canon. Gaah.‡‡ There are two reasons why the amount of time is insane: first is that I (as usual) don’t know what I’m doing.‡‡‡ The second is that Finale, in its infinite lack of wisdom, blops everything that goes above or below the staff in a single undifferentiated heap: second thing on top of first thing and third thing on top of second. So if, for example, you have lyrics and then you want to add dynamic markings . . . you will then have to go back and move all your crescendos and diminuendos, all your fs and ps, off the lyrics and each other. And as you’re highlighting and dragging, about half the time you grab the wrong thing, because you can’t see what you’re doing because everything is in a heap. Not to mention having to do the lining-up by eye: Finale does give you ruled lines that flash into existence when you start to drag something . . . but they move too. Arrrrrgh.
Maybe it’s just as well, the harmonising arrrrrghs from the dog bed. All right all right. So we went out again. It didn’t rain for a little while. And then it did. And then it didn’t. And then it did. And then . . . And then I declared us hurtled and we went back to the mews. And the piano. And Finale.§
And . . . this is all your fault, you forum musicians. Especially the singers, but you’re all implicated, all you people who keep posting about music. I haven’t got time to join a choir.§§ But I need something to get me going with singing: Gypsy Rover and Suzanne may be frightening the badgers when I’m out with hellhounds, but it’s not teaching me anything about how to sing and I don’t want to damage anything because at my age badly treated bits start dropping off and rolling under the furniture and never being seen again. I have a very nice book on Finding Your Voice but I’m not going to find it without help, despite all the diagrams. And I want to be able to sing what I’m writing. Well, some of it. I want to be able to sing the poems of Peter’s that I’ve set, for example. I also kind of want to know just how bad the news is and if I want to write something I can sing I have four notes to do it in.§§§
So I asked Oisin. I said, gods help me, I need a voice teacher. I need a short sharp shock of voice lessons. I want someone to tell me what to do to get me started. Do you know anyone who’d be willing to take someone with no voice to speak/sing of, who only wants to be able to sing her own strange crabbed compositions?
Oisin is great. He didn’t laugh. He sat there staring into space (or possibly at Silly Canon, which was stretched on the piano rack in front of him) and finally said: you know, you want someone really good, someone who will understand what you want, and able to hear what you’re capable of and tell you how to get there—and what you’re not capable of and need to give up on. He then fixed me with a hard eye and said, you know you’ll have to go back occasionally to check on progress.
Yes, sir, I said meekly.
Let me think about it, he said. I’m sure I can find someone. You’ll have to nag me.
I’ve added it to the list: Nag Oisin about Voice Teacher with Sense of the Absurd.
* * *
* Or very likely on the floor, since I tend to sleep with the windows open.
** Sunday mornings being the most gruesome. I try to remember to be grateful that we don’t ring the early service which starts at eight.^ I’m not usually awake enough at 8:45 to be grateful.
^ I would like to think that the neighbours might object to bells at 7:15 on a Sunday morning, but most of the people who live slap next door to the churchyard seem to be the bright-eyed chirpy little old ladies and gentlemen I see coming out of the 8 o’clock service when I’m tottering up the path and thinking, bell ringing, for pity’s sake, why didn’t I take up knitting?+
+You can also knit indoors in bad weather. And I could be wrong, but I assume your knitting bag doesn’t leap and cavort and get under your feet and howl if you neglect it. Or step on it, because it’s getting under your feet.
*** And for me to be paying for it. But let me also observe that I have, more than once, on bad ME days, rung him up Friday morning and said, I feel like death on toast^ but I would like to come anyway, can he bear it/think of something to do with me? These are the days he plays Bach and points out how subversive Bach is, or tells me about the brilliance of Benjamin Britten or fabulous pipe organs he has known . . . or rails about the economy and the prime minister and the criminal lack of music education in schools. He also tells really, really bad jokes. I come for the floor show.
^ Why toast? Death on kippers? Death on a bed of watercress, radicchio and fennel, with garlic croutons and mayonnaise?
† Yes, yes, very funny, it is still morning when I get up
†† Ephialtes will be leading the Persians round through my posh neighbour’s garden. Hee hee hee hee.
††† Except for the wet spot on the carpet. Frell.
‡ Actually Peter does this. But I’m the one puts the food bowls down. Aaaaaugh. Not food again.
‡ I try to make a point, after I’ve been shrieking and throwing wadded-up manuscript paper across the room in a frenzy, of telling poor Peter, who bought it for me about this time last year, that while Finale makes me frelling nuts, I’d be lost, astray and accursed without it.
‡‡ Although this dynamics thing could definitely catch on. I think it appeals to my control freakery. No, I said loud! That’s a crescendo, you oaf!
§ I may do an Ode to the Aroma of Wet Dog. I feel that the lyrics ought to be out there already, by Ogden Nash or someone. But I can hear the first few chords, and the cranky melody.
§§ Another night out a week and Peter will divorce me, etc.
§§§ It works for Leonard Cohen.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.