Another New Experience
I don’t need new experiences. In my more rational moments I don’t even want new experiences.* I would like to sit around comfortably in the company of some** old experiences*** and chill. I would like, for example, to lower the several foot-and-a-half high† stacks of newspapers and magazines that seem to have accumulated on and around not one but two kitchen tables†. I would like to watch the several operas I have recorded off Sky Arts††. I would like to need only two hours of sleep a night.†††
So this afternoon saw me penetrating into the darkest Edwardian back streets‡ of Mauncester in search of a voice teacher. By some unsettling miracle I managed to find the address he’d given me without the usual detour through Cornwall, which meant I even arrived on time, how great is that? Making a Good First Impression.
So, hey, is it written on my forehead or something that This One Likes Being Thrown in at the Deep End, Ignore the Screams? Good grief. I’d been so careful to explain, by phone and email, that I haven’t sung in thirty-five years, that I don’t read music—I go home and figure it out by going plunk plunk plunk on the piano—and that when I sang in choirs and things as a teenager even after I’d figured it out on the piano I could only stay on the line by standing next to someone who was singing what I was supposed to sing. He—I’m going to call him Blondel—had asked me over the phone if I had any music I was comfortable singing and I made a short sharp barking noise reminiscent of a laugh and said, No.‡‡ I just said I hadn’t sung in thirty-five years. Perhaps it was a mistake to admit that I’d taken voice lessons for a year at college. It probably was a mistake to admit that I probably still had some of that music. It was definitely a mistake to have found the book and taken it along‡‡‡ because he fell on it with little cries of delight. Oh, this is the book, he said. This is the book that voice teachers all start with.§
And then he sat down at the piano, opened the book, said, Oh, this is a nice one, let’s start with that, and started playing.
You know, I’d also told him that I’m paralytic with stage fright just as standard and can barely play the piano for Oisin, and that I’d be doing really well to make any noise at all for him for the first lesson. Blah arrgh frell etc.
Well . . . I did make some noise. Noises. I’m not sure we should go so far as to call it singing.§§ We hammered§§§ the poor old aria¤ for a while, and then he gave me a lecture on breathing and some exercises to do¤¤, and then he fetched out an intimidating pile of sheet music of his own and started flicking through it, and came up with Panis Angelicus by Cesar Franck. We strangled that for a while—this one also has an accompaniment which has almost nothing to do with the melody—and by this time our hour¤¤¤ was nearly up. At some point he also had made me sing a few scales and discovered I have about two usable octaves left to play with, which is enough to be going on with, and he says he’s pretty sure there are a few more at the top that will come back with practise. I had also brought two of my books of arty folk songs, the complete Benjamin Britten and a collection by people like Britten and Beethoven and Haydn and Vaughan Williams, and he said, oh yes, splendid, find something in here you’d like to sing.# Like. Uh. Okay.
And at that point I found myself back out in the street again with a general sense of having been caught and expelled from some kind of brand-new maelstrom. And I hope I don’t decide I enjoy it too much. I don’t have time.
* * *
* Except the one about being at the top of the best seller list—any best seller list, I’m not fussy—for long enough never to have to worry again about builders’ work coming in at fifty percent over^ the estimate.^^
^ Despite having not bought any £800 radiators. Which radiators nonetheless still haunt my dreams.+ My Wednesday tower has a few of the original old radiators and I find myself eyeing them in a considering sort of way and wondering if they’re appreciated sufficiently in their present location.
+ Who knew there were radiators that could haunt one’s dreams?~
~ Oh dear, I feel a complex tangent on radiators coming on. No! No! Wait till a day I don’t have a New Experience to write about!
^^ My part of the bargain is that I will try not to acquire any large properties turned down by the National Trust because of too-extensive necessary restoration work.
** Carefully chosen
*** Finishing writing a book, for example. I’d really like to have that old experience again some time in the near future.
† Which I find is about the cut-off for free-standing. Periodicals slither so. If you have a wall to lean them up against, well . . . the ceiling’s the limit. Although you still have to be a little careful about stacking, or the centre will explode with a kind of hot-lava-like effect . . . ask me how I know this.
†† And when Third House is up and running, three
††† I like the whole going to bed, reading, turning off the light and settling down on/among an excess of pillows ritual. I’d be sorry to give it up. I just object to the amount of time that follows before I can get out of bed again.
‡ Edward VII had one urban architect who trotted tirelessly all over England, throwing up the same row of houses everywhere. Well, okay, maybe not everywhere. Everywhere I’ve been.
‡‡ I sing Gypsy Rover and Suzanne while I’m out walking hellhounds, you know?
‡‡‡ I’m now going to make a concerted effort to find my old copy of Che Faro Eurydice, which was my favourite of all the stuff I sang. But it’s just a few loose pages, and . . . anybody out there who has ever dabbled in an instrument will know the way sheet music stacks up. It’s as bad as magazines on the kitchen table. Or against the kitchen wall.
§ Whatever. It’s in Italian and it just says ‘30 Arie’ on the front cover.
§§ Although he complimented me on picking up the melody—have I mentioned that the accompaniment is an accompaniment and does not play the melody, although it wanders through it occasionally in a confusing manner? Snoooork. He obviously belongs to the Oisin School of Supportive Teaching. And I will admit, horrible as it all was, my tiny frail new sense of relative pitch was in there slugging, way over its weight, but . . . it’s obviously mine, it’s obstinate. I did have sort of half to a quarter of a prayer with the crotchets (quarter notes) and minims (half notes), but quavers (eighth notes)? Forget it. Semiquavers (sixteenth notes)? Don’t even bother. I can’t think that fast. It’s not, I may say, entirely different from the experience of trying to ring a change method you don’t know well enough.
§§§ We did nothing like hammer. I haven’t got enough voice for hammering. It’s more a mosquito-in-the-room noise. Thin, flat (or maybe sharp), and irritating.
¤ Sebben, Crudele by Antonio Caldara, if any of you singers want to know
¤¤ Which I can’t do, of course
¤¤¤ Hour! An hour! Singing!
# We may have contrived to bond a bit over Britten, of whom he is also a big fan. He is himself a bass-baritone^ and I told him about Britten’s Ballad of Little Musgrave and Lady Barnard, which he didn’t know, and which is for tenor, baritone and bass, and he was interested so I’m going to try to remember to take it with me next week—yes, I’m going back next week. This Would All Be Worth It if he gets together with two of his friends and performs the freller in my hearing.
^ Which made trying to sing along with me to give me a clue rather amusing
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.