Mamee mamee oo oo oo
No, I haven’t lost my mind.* It’s a vocal exercise. Today was my first voice lesson in—eep—three weeks. Life has kept getting in the way.** And for a variety of reasons, including that it’s been three weeks since my last lesson*** and I’ve only just started voice lessons and I have no clue, I was expecting it to be kind of a disaster. Blondel would be very nice about it, because he’s a nice young man, but it was going to be bad.
Starting with the fact that I got to bed at 4:30 am this morning.†
No, sadly, I was not boiling on in a hot haze of creativity and miraculously finishing the third draft of PEGASUS while the last shadows of the 31st of August still lay in the unswept corners††.
There was a wasp. And not just a wasp, but a wasp of wasps, a titan of wasps, a veritable leviathan of wasps, with a buzz that shook the floor. You could see the light fixture tremble in its socket as this behemoth bashed against it. It was not a lot smaller than my thumb, and no, I am not exaggerating. It’s the biggest frelling wasp I’ve ever seen. Its head was as big as my thumbnail, if a little more triangular, and when it turned its head and looked at me every cheap horror movie I’ve ever seen ††† rose gibbering out of my memory and mocked me.
I tried locking it up in the bathroom with the light out, the window open, and the kitchen-door-into-the-garden light on. I tried this for a long time. I’d close the door and go . . . pay a few bills. Renew my subscriptions to The Society of Homeopaths and the Alliance of Registered Homeopaths. Donate to a few more charities.‡ Rub upside-down hellhound tummies.
Check bathroom.
It’s still there. It’s nesting among my clean sheets.
Open window wider. Go back to office. Reread the currently most salient bits of FIND YOUR VOICE‡‡. Whimper.
Check bathroom.
It’s still there.
I finally killed it. I didn’t want to kill it, both because I don’t like killing things and because it frelling terrified me. And I had a godsawful time doing the killing, trying to get anything like a decent shot at it—the cottage is not set up for getting decent shots with a flyswatter at zooming fiends, especially zooming fiends more realistically faced with a shotgun—whining with fear and shaking with adrenaline: but there was no way I was going to sleep with that thing in the house.
So I rolled out of bed this morning very late, and stupid with the aftereffects of murder and epinephrine—and needing to get my soggy, lumpy self going because I had a voice lesson in a few hours. The omens were not good.
And then sometimes you just totally luck out. Today was one of my days for lucking out. In the first place I was just happy to see Blondel: ah yes, the deranged young gentleman who thinks he can teach me to sing. What larks. So to speak. But I’d got myself in a no-no-I-can’t-do-it posture of helplessness and despair about correct breathing during the last three weeks, and in hindsight my salvation, I think, is that I more or less said ‘okay, can’t do it, fine, just get on with it’. I can do my funny exercises‡‡‡, which I have been doing, which are mostly various scales on various vowel sounds, and I can stop to breathe at the end of each scale, and I can learn the melody of my songs enough that—eventually—the melody will be the one thing I don’t have to think about when I’m trying to sing the wretched things.
I can also, in a mwa ha ha ha ha two for the price of one way, get on with my transcriptions. Since I last saw Blondel I’ve transposed Beethoven’s ‘The Miller of Dee’ and ‘The Pulse of an Irishman’ down a few steps to make them more easily in my range. I didn’t have the top notes for either one and it also just seems wasteful to have all these notes at the other end and never use them. Transposing probably looks like a mindless, mechanical exercise, and for someone who knows what they’re doing it probably is. It isn’t to me. In the first place I have a messy sort of mind, and the idea of going through an entire song and counting down two or five steps for every note and writing that down sounds paralytically boring. So I just gave myself a first note and made it sound like the original only lower, and wrote that down. I found it really made me look at the music, what the composer is doing and how he’s put it together,§ and the mwa ha ha ha ha part is that I figure I can use this with Oisin as well as Blondel. But I’m already scuppered: having flourished my manuscript paper at Blondel today he said, hey, that’s great, well done, bring me the piano accompaniment next week. Uh. Well, I was planning to do a piano accompaniment: but I was planning on simplifying it quite a lot. For me. Blondel is a real pianist. As well as a singer. Frell.§§
Even my breathing is better! And I have no idea why! I murdered§§§ Sebben Crudele so much less savagely this week that Blondel was actually trying to convince me to add a little expression. One more thing to remember. Go away. But I wasn’t getting dizzy with hyperventilation at the end of every phrase this week, which was giving Blondel ideas.¤ I think what has happened is the ‘okay, you can’t do it, just get on with it’ thing of merely singing has been getting me used to singing. I sang—well, I was making noise¤¤—pretty steadily for the entire hour, and I am not hoarse, and I am not going to have to take the next day or two off. I also guess that that year of voice lessons I took back at the dawn of time left one or two permanent traces, and my long-disused singing voice is saying ‘oh—yeah—actually we can do this’. Now, I suspect, is when the real work begins.
We finished with a pass through Panis Angelicus, which did not, I admit, go as well as Sebben Crudele had: it felt weirdly high, and the notes kept not being quite where I expected them to be, which meant I totally blew the timing of the last page, which looks straightforward and isn’t. I thought oh well, never mind, I’m getting tired, it’s been a pretty relentless hour. And then Blondel noticed that he hadn’t flipped the automatic-transposition switch on his fancy electric piano back off again—his Sebben Crudele is lower than mine—so the Panis Angelicus he was playing was higher than I was used to, and the notes were not quite where I was expecting them to be. . . .
Same time, same station, next week. Excelsior, and all that.
* * *
* Um. I think I haven’t lost my mind. I don’t guarantee it.
** His life! Not my life! I don’t have a life! I’m too busy doing stuff!
*** And now that term has started, Blondel says, he will be as steady and reliable as Renee Fleming hitting a high C.
† Well. Maybe 4:27.
†† Unswept Corners a Speciality.
††† I only watch cheap ones. The expensive ones are too scary.
‡ Mostly I subscribe to charities because it’s easier. But there are two or three that I’ve never quite signed on for who have hit on the wheeze of sending you address labels and saying ‘this is to thank you . . . blah blah blah’. If, in fact, I use their dranglefabbing address labels^, I send them a donation, although I disapprove in principle of printing all those address labels on spec.
^ If they spell my name right and have some decorative plant icon, preferably a rose
‡‡ by Jo Thompson, http://www.amazon.co.uk/Find-Your-Voice-Self-Help-Singers/dp/1904411258/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1251839443&sr=8-1
‡‡‡ I thought mamee mamee oo oo oo was silly enough—the ‘oo oo oo’ are supposed to be done with sharp little kicks from your belly muscles, which of course I haven’t got and can’t do. I had managed, partially in self-defense I think, to forget how this exercise goes, or is supposed to go, and Blondel kindly reminded me today, and, no doubt to discourage me from further wriggling out of things by forgetting, gave me an even sillier exercise. You stick your tongue out as far as it will go and then try and talk, or rather sing: ma-na-la-va: up the scale and down again. Supposedly this is going to make your consonants crisper, when you fold your embarrassed and exhausted tongue back in your mouth again. Yes. And I’m Maria Callas.
§ Clever bloke, that Beethoven
§§ Meanwhile, because getting tangled up in your own machinations is always amusing, Blondel was playing the scales for me to sing today, and after a while he stopped. I had told him that my voice just shuts down between one half step and the next, and it hadn’t yet, so I looked at him and he said, I don’t think you need to go any higher, and tapped the note we’d got to . . . which was the top note of the Miller of Dee. Oh. Another object lesson in how expecting yourself to fail is a self-fulfilling prophesy. I’ve been playing those scales the last three weeks and topping out several notes lower.
§§§ There seems to be an awful lot of blood and violence in this entry
¤ This is the problem with all real teachers. They keep having ideas.
¤¤ This is something else about teachers that fascinates me: they have to be able to ‘hear’ something other than what’s being produced or they’d run screaming to the nearest job agency and ask for something easier like finding the equation for cold fusion or a solution to global warming. The hearing is literal in the case of a voice teacher: I sound like a cat being strangled, but Blondel, who, as I say, has a gorgeous voice himself, is hearing that I’m improving.
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