Singing
Cheez I love this singing racket. As previously observed, just what I don’t need, something else to love.* I could wish I were less irresistibly drawn to things I’m not very frelling good at, but this is probably all part of the master plan to keep me fit enough to go on writing novels. Which I hope I am good at** but it is an awful lot of hard work.***
I lost about five days’ singing, I think, to the last mad rush on PEGASUS, and when I started trying to practise again, it was like, What? What are you talking about? We don’t sing! We! Do! Not! Sing! We especially don’t sing something like He Was Despised! † —Who needs colleagues? I can have a major shareholder row and union walkout with myself.
So, musically speaking, I had an interesting weekend. †† I think I told you after my last (disastrous) voice lesson when Silence Fell for the Soprano Soloist to Come In On Her Own . . . and silence just lay there because I couldn’t frelling do it, ††† I figured out that I’d been practising wrong. Heretofore—all the three months or whatever it is I’ve been taking voice lessons—the stuff I’ve been singing has been fairly straightforwardly accompanied, and you can pick up most of your notes—especially those awful beginnings after instrumental interludes—by what the piano has just played. Not here. And I’d been practising as I’d been practising, which is to say playing what I’m singing with my right hand and using my foot to tap out the rests and intervals and so on. I hadn’t paid anything like the necessary attention to what the real accompaniment is doing . . . like periodically leaving the singer out in the cold.
I am failing to get over to you—to all of you who are not experienced professional or semi-professional singers with well trained mellifluous voices, or instrumentalists of like calibre, and nerves of steel are also a good thing—the sheer horror of what young Mr Blondel, in his easy, friendly, off hand way was expecting me to do. Did I or did I not go in there my first lesson and say that I have Crippling Stage Fright? ‡ And I spurn his ridiculous protests that it’s ‘only him’. Gah. Only him and his to-die-for bass-baritone voice which he lets off lead occasionally for demonstration purposes. GAH.
Anyway. I’ve been drilling myself silly the last few days on the naked bits. It doesn’t help that Mr Handel is a clever-clogs and keeps messing with the singing line. ‡‡ You get one entry nailed‡‡‡ and he goes and jiggles the next one, like a hellhound joggling your elbow. I can carry a tune and I can count beats but this is a bit like someone who pedals downtown for the paper every morning being told she is going to enter the Tour de France.
So I turned up for my voice lesson today with somewhat mixed emotions. I Am Going to Do This Thing and I’m already well and thoroughly bitten by the singing bug, but . . .
Well. I did it. I sang frelling He Was Despised all the way through§. I came in where I was supposed to, even when I was all alone, and I was (more or less) on the right notes, even when no one was helping. And I did it more than once. It was not a thing of beauty, but . . . it was recognisable. And it was several hells of a lot better than a fortnight ago. The other thing that had kept happening a fortnight ago is that my voice shut down in terror and the only noises I was making at all kept cracking. I was cracking a lot today too (sigh) but there were about two minutes there toward the end after Blondel had been trying to figure out a metaphor that would enable me to do what he wanted me to do—this is that whole wretched voice placement thing—when I was singing rather than cracking. We both noticed. Yaay. If I can do it once I can do it again. It’s all confidence, you know? Cheez. I can sing this. I just don’t believe I can.
But . . . progress.
And I am completely shattered. I feel like I’ve been in the Tour de France.
* * *
* Hellhounds say, What? Who? You love us.^ Who is this Singing Racket? We don’t approve.
Radio Three has an essay series weeknights at 11 pm. This week’s topic is ‘When writers play’ and it’s about writers and their musical instruments. Usually I turn it off.^^ Not this week. Last night Patrick Gale^^^ talked about his cello. He’d played seriously through his teens and then gave it up for twenty years. When he started again, he said, he made terrible noises which distressed his dogs, especially a sensitive deerhound which kept nudging his elbow to push his bowing hand off the strings. Snork. The hellhounds are, as those of you with memories for useless trivia will remember, one-eighth deerhound.
I also know that domestic fauna reacting to human music [sic] making is a cliché, but it’s still pretty funny when it’s you and yours. I don’t remember that I had to break the hellhounds in to my piano playing, but then I was already playing the piano when they arrived, and it was just one more unreasonable adjustment they had to make, like not peeing on the floor and not soliciting action at 3 a.m.^^^^ But the singing is new.
The dog bed at the mews is next to the piano and they sleep through both my keyboard practising and my composing without discernable trauma. But the screechy noises I make when I sing are evidently more than a hellhound should be obliged to bear stoically. Although I’m not sure they’re protesting, exactly. These guys are by far the most vocal of the dogs I’ve lived with—most and variously vocal: mere barking is only the beginning, and only Darkness is especially prone^^^^^; both of them prefer a kind of melodious yowling punctuated by squeaks. I think they may feel I am finally trying to speak dog, and are eager to be encouraging.
I can feel the little eyes popping open as I start on my warm-ups. And Chaos is very likely to emerge from the dog bed not only to nudge my elbow but to essay the odd harmonic. It’s even sillier when we’re out hurtling: Darkness will glance over his shoulder to check that I’m not in need of anything he could provide; Chaos will drop whatever he’s doing and rush up to me to stare meaningfully into my face. I’m sure it is meaningfully, but I’ve never managed to translate it.
I wish I thought this response could be relied on to work the next time they’re off lead and see a rabbit.
^ We permit the existence of Peter. He cuts up our roast chicken for us.
^^ Usually I am trying to write something. Ahem.
^^^ http://www.galewarning.org/index/flash.html
^^^^ Chaos still hasn’t learnt this one.
^^^^^ I’m not as quelling about this as I should be. I tend to bark back.
** !
*** I know there’s a lot of cross-creativity^ out there; writers who also play musical instruments are only one manifestation. I wonder how many of us are good at more than one thing though, and how many of us are exercising (say) our considerable, and wonderfully adaptable, gift for obstinacy.
^ No, no, cross as in pollinate! Not as in cranky!
† Any latecomers to the revelation that I am taking singing lessons: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sag0izq0g2s
I sing it about three times this speed, however. Yah! Don’t want to hang around listening to myself!
It also fascinates me that when it’s not happening to you, the idea/sound of a singer coming in all alone and surrounded by [aaaaugh] silence is merely an excellent dramatic technique. It also displays the loveliness of the voice [more aaaaugh], supposing there is any loveliness to be displayed.
†† I’ve also forgotten how to play the piano. Maybe I’ll talk about that later in the week.
††† I did wonder a little if poor Blondel might have thought when I cancelled last week that I wasn’t coming back. He doesn’t know me very well yet. I love challenges! Humiliation is my favourite!
‡ And did he or did he not immediately open my old book of Arie, say, oh, that’s a nice one, and start playing? —Maybe he’s just having senior moments very early in his career, poor thing??^
^ I don’t think so.
‡‡ Although, as above. When it’s Eileen Farrell it’s a great idea.
‡‡‡ Relatively speaking
§ Although I still haven’t figured out how to practise the He Gave His Back to the Smiters part. The accompaniment is busy being manic while you’re supposed to be maintaining a smooth singing line. Yah. Tell it to the Marines.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.