Guest blog by B-Twin
GEMMA
During my childhood our family never had a dog. We had finches and guinea pigs^.
Upon finishing High School I headed off to Agricultural College and home became a relative’s farm. College kept me busy for several years before I started my job as Alpaca Stud Farm Manager.
I’ve always loved dogs. The farm dogs were great – and they responded well to me – but they weren’t mine. So once I had a job I decided that a dog was next on the list. The list of breeds to choose from of course is rather large so I narrowed down the choices by settling on that it had to be a working breed. Working with sheep preferably since that is the stock kept at home.
The end result – a Shetland Sheepdog^^ or “Sheltie” as they are commonly called.
My vet mentioned that just down the road from me (literally) there was a breeder of long standing that was very thorough with all the health checks etc etc. So I rang them up to have a chat. Then I went to their place to have a look^^^.
They had a new litter just born, sired by one of their (champion) dogs.
My request was simple: I wanted a bitch* and one that would grow on the large side for a Sheltie.
Several weeks later I came home with this:
The new pup was named “Gemma” (“Oh, isn’t she a gem.” Corny, but true.)
A couple of weeks later there was a slight accident, whilst playing in the garden, and my new-pup-owner’s heart was dealt a blow when she tumbled down a rock and broke her leg**.
But, being a young pup was in her favour and the enforced confinement certainly helped to make her very quiet and friendly. As well as missing the “Must Dig in The Garden” phase. Yes, I am looking on the bright side.
Despite this less-than-ideal start to farm life she recovered very well and she was then introduced to sheep work. Realistically she was never going to be a large paddock style dog. Her forte was in the sheep yards where her bark could move a mob of recalcitrant ewes faster than the offer of food. A ‘tough little cookie’ she gamely stood up to rough sheep and would dust herself off and leap back in if she was knocked over. Dogs twice her size can often be scared and refuse to work under such conditions.
Gemma’s nickname for many years has been “The Duchess” due to her ability to sit regally wherever she is. And the fact she swans about eliciting attention from anyone who decides to sit down…
The Duchess is holding court
Several years ago I came home to find her holding her leg in a rather painful fashion. Somehow, she had managed to rupture her Anterior Cruciate Ligament.
It certainly put an end to her sheep-working days.
So then Belle came on the scene. At first Gemma thought this uncouth little upstart was a visitor that would soon be leaving.
She finally warmed to the whole “adoring puppy” idea though.
Smiling for the camera
Her retirement wasn’t complete though – once she recovered from a second bout of surgery*** she would still assist by guarding the house from rampaging sheep. That small task was eventually dispensed with though when she lost interest.
In Gemma’s world there are a couple of things that remain constant. Her love of food and attention from people. She is certainly a typical Sheltie in that she is a game little dog with a sweet and loyal character. And very smart. (Shelties are very close to Border Collies in the IQ ratings.)
As her arthritis started to have more of an impact I made the decision to let her stay inside during the winter (we don’t have extreme winters and it is not normal for farm dogs to be inside the house much in Australia.)
A special bed was made for her to rest upon:
Her patience was tested earlier this year though when her position of power (inside the house) was disturbed by Belle and the Puppy Saga. Gemma’s relief was almost palpable when Belle went to live outside again!
Reading quality books in retirement..
At nearly 14 years of age Gemma is, while I write this, fast asleep on her sheepskin bed. Her arthritis is progressively becoming worse and given her struggles with this winter I’m not sure how she will cope with next winter. As she hobbles around it is easy to get a little down while watching her. But when you call “Dinner!” you discover there is life in the old girl yet…. ;)
—-
^ and never had a cat. That’s another story that will not be uttered…
^^ which is NOT a miniature Rough Collie!!!!!
^^^I did make it out alive. Although seriously wounded by the level of cute.
* to be spayed. At the time I wasn’t allowed to have an intact bitch at home and she was sold on the condition she be spayed anyway. And I wasn’t about to have a male dog. I can’t stand the whole “pee on anything that stands still” thing.
** took the growth plate off the head of the femur. Years later when the leg was X-rayed the vet said you couldn’t tell it had ever been broken.
*** She’s the 1 in a 1000 dogs that rejects the artificial ligament… Nearly 12 mths after the original operation she had another to remove the nylon that was literally being ejected from her leg.
Rain and Song
It’s raining. Get used to it, McKinley, it’s clearly the wave of the future.* It took me over forty-five minutes to get home from my voice lesson today**, a journey that usually takes fifteen, thanks to—mostly—the weather. It was also what passes for rush hour gridlock in a small southern city and as I groped my way hand over hand to Wolfgang from Blondel’s front door and the wind gave me friction burns, I had thought about going home the back way, but the problem with little kinky country roads in the dark is that you can’t see the floodwaters reaching out their sticky little hands to grab you.*** Nor can the other fellow coming toward you on one of those patented English one-lane-wide-but-two-way-traffic roads. So I stayed in town. I suspect some other back-lane motorists did the same, for similar reasons.† And the gridlock fairies love wet nights: they roll out their very best holograms of pantechnicons with exhaust problems and extra-wide double-decker buses with nervous drivers.
I got home ready to make ratatouille out of the first person I saw but fortunately Peter was having a lie down and I was greeted by hellhounds, lovely furry wagging-tailed doe-eyed hellhounds. There’s something terribly disarming about dogs.†† So I made myself a cup of tea and sat down on the floor to be cavorted on and began to feel better.†††
For example, I contemplated the voice lesson (almost) just past. ‡ This was not due to be one of my better ones. I had nearly made ratatouille of my computer shortly before I had to leave and only stopped mid-voice-destroying shriek on the sudden razor-edged thought that I was going to have to sing in about half an hour. My fault for going back to the computer after I’d been flogging myself through the remarkably slippery Fear No More‡‡. It looks just fine lying there on the page—I began to have my suspicions most of a week ago when I was still picking out the melody on the piano to sing to‡‡‡—there ought to be a law against reusing a phrase and changing it only slightly§, just enough to bewilder and dismay. Furthermore, Finzi keeps changing both the key signature and the time signature, so you’ve just got used to this frelling 6/4 thing when he shifts you to 4/4 which suddenly feels all short and clipped. And it’s in two flats or five and I had a brain spasm caused by too many superfluously-flatted As and started learning the whole two-flat section in three flats which I then had to go back and unlearn,§§ like the intervals weren’t tricky enough. And then I started to learn the five-flat section in four flats except that it sounded funny, fortunately, but not before I’d already got some of it in my ear. Sigh. So I went in there knowing I was going to make hash of a song I already knew Blondel is fond of. And hoarse from screaming.
I won’t say that my Fear No More was a thing of savage-soothing beauty, because it wasn’t.§§§ But I got through all of it without too many train wrecks when I really wanted to die, and it did sound like I’d been working on it.¤ And chances are I will have the tune down by next week.¤¤ But the funny thing was that my voice was ‘freer’ than usual. I still kept closing up every time I forgot not to think about it, if you follow me, but for Tuesday afternoons with Blondel in the room, it was better than usual. I’d stopped singing earlier—and gone recklessly back to my computer—precisely because I didn’t want to have sung myself croaky before I even got to my lesson.¤¤¤ And here I was producing one or two notes that actually sounded like a singer’s notes.
But my moment of (relative) glory was when we went back to Che Faro. I’ve mostly been bludgeoning on with Fear No More, but one of the things Blondel had told me last week was to stop singing all those broken chords in Che Faro as separate notes, boink boink boink, it’s all one smooth line. And, he said, this will help your breathing. It does too. You have bags more breath when it’s all one line. This afternoon however we were beginning to run out of time, and I did want to sing Che Faro again, so we were going at it at a bit of what, in my world, counts as a lick, and I was having to concentrate not to go off the rails. I’m still not sure what happened; I can worry no matter how much I’m concentrating. And I told you last week that one of the problems with those high Fs at the end is that they’re not only the climax but you’ve had the entire frelling aria to worry about them, and by the time I get there I haven’t a prayer. Squeaky toys r us. I’ve sung Fs before, even with Blondel in the room; there’s at least one in Caro mio ben, but it isn’t all out there being significant. It’s just a note in a line.
Today I had the climactic F. It was not a Marilyn Horne F, but it was an F. Maybe I should get mad at my computer more often.
* * *
* Until the drought next summer or whenever. Sigh. I hope this is the planet, you know?, and not us. That she’s just rolling over in her sleep and will settle down again. This doesn’t make me any less dedicated to hanging on to what rainforest we have left, a government subsidy to put a compost bin in every garden, and the criminalisation of SUVs, but if it’s the planet I get to complain. If it’s us, I don’t. I will, but it will rack up bad karma points.
** It might have been worse if the wind had got just a little more organised and picked us up and dropped us on a church steeple or something. Will the fire brigade rescue treed cars?
*** Which is not really funny. Even less funny just now, because someone died on a road in the dark here a few days ago when his car hit invisible black water and spun out of control. What makes it worse is that someone else who’d had the same thing happen but was luckier had reported it and the report hadn’t got out.
† Weather like this I do not begrudge the bedraggled motorcyclists splattering down the margins.
†† I’m not hearing giggling from the dog bed, am I?
††† Then I rang Hannah so she could commiserate. She said, don’t tell me how miserable you are. You are loving Twittering about all the rain.
I am not! I said. Twitter is an urgent professional duty! Merrilee said so!
Since when did Merrilee saying something mean you were going to do it? said Hannah. Merrilee would have talked you into book-jacket author photos thirty years ago if you hadn’t threatened her with that Klingon sword^.
^ Bat’leth. Yes, I know. But Hannah doesn’t. Hannah, you know, approaches normal.
‡ Just past would have meant I got home in fifteen minutes.
‡‡ These composers. They’re all ratbags.^
^ Oh good. I’ll fit right in.
‡‡‡ Singing it through with Blondel is like having a comfy nap in the back seat while your chauffeur does the driving.
§ Ratbags. As I said.
§§ I may abscond with a few of the resulting three-flat phrases though, for my own malign singer-torturing purposes. Mwa ha ha ha ha.
§§§ As I keep saying, my singing never is going to be a thing of beauty, savage-soothing or otherwise. But I am going to get to where some group or chorus or something will be glad to have me, since they can’t get anyone better.
¤ When John Henry was a little baby, sitting on his papa’s knee
He picked up a hammer and little piece of steel
Said hammer’s gonna be the death of me, lord, lord . . .
Pardon me for a moment while I wax fatuous on the subject of Blondel. How did he get so kindly and patient so young? I think the thing that amazes me the most about him is the way he treats you like a colleague. Like you’re a musician too. We do to some extent have a common language^ because I love a lot of the classical music that he’s got frelling university degrees in and I may not know what it means or where it comes from or what all the funny marks on the score are but I like the noise. But as well as telling me things like to sing through my eyes and that going up actually means going down [sic], he talks to me about interpretation. I can’t get the ungleblarging notes right, but he’s saying things like, there is a blossoming of intensity here. Uh. Yeah. I’m sure there is.
^ Although he’d never heard of Steeleye Span
¤¤ Which I fear will only encourage him to talk more about interpretation
¤¤¤ And I knew this was a danger because . . .
Lo-text hi-cal Monday
I got up this morning possibly a little later than I meant to*. The fact that once or twice I opened my eyes long enough to look out the window which was a solid grey blur** was not encouraging and with a pillow over my head I don’t have to hear the rain. Finally had to get out of bed because I started thinking which is fatal to sleep.
It was still raining.
I washed all the dishes.***
It was still raining.
I swept the floor.
It was still raining. The forecast had said there would be breaks in the rain. Well, it slows down a little occasionally. I haven’t seen any breaks.
I hoovered the floor.
It was still raining.
I took the hoover apart to see if I could figure out why the little flexy-hose thing that you get into the corners with has no suck. Discovered plug of hellhound hair in the weird ill-designed elbow of connection between the hose and the hoover, pulled it out with a shout of triumph, put hoover back together and . . . the hose still has no suck.
And it was still raining.
By this point it was getting hard to move around because I had hellhounds welded to various parts of my anatomy making muted but persistent noises of the our-sphincter-control-is-magnificent-but-we-would-like-to-go-out-please-no-not-the-back-garden-are-you-kidding-it’s-ankle-deep-out-there† variety.
The weather report had said that the day would improve. And—lo—there was an actual beam of sunlight. I can sure see how sun worship started. So I flung harnesses on hellhounds and we leaped forth.
About ten minutes later the sky cracked like a vase and the water started streaming—no, oceaning—down. Even turning around and bolting for home we were Beyond Wet by the time we arrived—we had discovered a new dimension of wetness. This is the kind of rain that laughs at Goretex. Chaos, who has a slight turn for the dramatic, was convinced that he had been damaged by being that wet. Darkness merely wanted to know why I don’t do something about it. I bundled them into the car and we went down to the mews, where there’s more usable space for fidgeting.
And we fidgeted.
By this time it was the middle of the afternoon and we all wanted our lunch. Except that we didn’t want our lunch because WE HADN’T HAD OUR HURTLE YET.
Eventually we went out in light rain.
And then had lunch, listening to the rain on the windows. Have I mentioned the wind?
We went squishily out again this evening. But it was barely raining at all. There was even a hazy moon. Made hazier by the light rain on my glasses.
The weather report says ‘a band of heavy rain will move in over night to reach all areas by morning’.
I need chocolate. And we haven’t had a recipe in forever.
Mint Brownies
1 pan’s worth of your favourite brownie recipe.†† Don’t use nuts, and do use a few drops of good peppermint oil. †††
Mint icing: 1 ½ c icing sugar
6 T soft slightly salted butter
Handful of crushable peppermint candy. Which you duly whack to crumbs with your rolling pin. The availability of crushable peppermint candy varies, I find, especially if you’re a nut case like me and want it organic and no weird dyes. I’ve had excellent results using sugar cubes and a few more drops of peppermint oil. Mix in a bowl and let sit while you make the brownies. Then when you’re ready to put the icing together, smash the cubes. You want it a little lumpy. Don’t put it in the blender.
Do the usual smushed-together icing thing with the confectioner’s sugar and the butter, and then when it’s all nice and smooth stir in the almost-crushed candy.
Spread on your pan of (cold) brownies. Put it in the refrigerator for the icing to set and melt about half a bar (50g) of Green & Black’s dark chocolate (or equivalent) and drizzle it over. You can melt a little butter in with the chocolate to make it smoother if you like.
Alternatively, if you’re feeling seriously in the need of cheering up, make the icing with 1 c sugar and 4 t butter, and then just barely melt an entire bar of G&B’s mint chocolate. Now their mint chocolate is dark chocolate with drooly mint centres. So this takes a little agility. My most successful attempt(s) involve using a biggish pan with a heavy flat bottom and breaking up the chocolate into its individual squares, warming it gently, while standing over it like an alchemist expecting gold, and the MOMENT it starts to go soft and lose its shape, whip it over to your brownies, dump it out, and rub it around with a knife. ‡ You want a nice swirl of icing, chocolate, and runny mint. Note: even if the result looks a little funny, it’ll still taste great. Supposing you wanted mint brownies in the first place, which I assume you did, if you’ve got this far.
Maybe the weather will change its mind.
* * *
* I was reading Elizabeth Moon’s HUNTING PARTY last night and I kept just wanting to know what happens. . . .
** Yes, all right, without my glasses on everything is a solid blur, but it doesn’t have to be grey.
*** Not that there were all that many. Two powerful reasons for eating as many meals^ as possible at the mews: Peter doesn’t merely do the cooking, he can’t bear not to do the cooking^^, and he has the dishwasher.
^ human and hellhound
^^ He’s sort of an interesting house guest.
† This is on gravel, mind you. The hellhounds’ courtyard is gravel.
†† I can recommend ‘gooey brownies’ already on Playing with Your Food
††† Be sure you get food quality. I believe a good aromatherapy peppermint is also edible, but check. Also peppermint oil varies in strength and flavour quite a lot, so you’ll have to experiment. But be careful—generally speaking a little bit goes a long way.
‡ I almost forgot. If you rub the tiniest smidgen of butter over the bottom of your pan first–just enough to slick the way for the chocolate–you raise your chances of success considerably.
Shattered again
I spent yesterday going to a birthday party in Gloucestershire. No, really. Peter’s next-younger brother’s 80th birthday party. Long-term readers will remember Peter’s 80th birthday party two years ago next month*—chiefly memorable to me, unfortunately, because Chaos was scarily ill and I almost didn’t make it to the party at all.**
I thought I wasn’t going to make it to this one. PEGASUS has rendered most of my life null and void the last few months*** and from past experience I figured the chances were pretty good that I’d be felled by the ME like a hellgoddess rammed from behind by a happy, rioting, off-lead hellhound† as soon as I turned it in,†† and barring helicopters††† Gloucestershire is at best about two hours away. I was poised on the brink of declaring I wouldn’t go, and letting next-younger-brother invite someone else, rather than risk cancelling at the eleventh hour when I found out I wasn’t walking, when Peter’s Gloucestershire-living son declared that he’d be happy to spend eight hours driving to fetch us there and back. ‡
I said yes before he could change his mind. Because I am a selfish, exploitative cow, and I may hate parties, but it’s crappy not to go to your husband’s brother’s 80th birthday bash.‡‡
And it was a very nice party.‡‡‡ And the food was good and the view was very pretty§ and I had some amusing conversations, §§ especially with other clan in-laws.
And today I am shattered.§§§ I would have liked my week off to be more off-ish. ¤ Granted neither birthday celebrations (mine or husband’s brothers’¤¤) nor concerts showcasing cherished idols of forty years’ standing are either compulsory or likely to make the world a better place and therefore deserving of one’s ultimate efforts . . . but I don’t have weeks like this. I am careful not to have weeks like this.
And I have to start looking at PEGASUS again tomorrow.
* * *
* Yes, eldest brother had 80th birthday party two years before that. But we now have five years to wait for youngest brother. Yes, there are four of them. And furthermore they were four out of twelve first cousins who all grew up pretty much together, partly because Peter’s dad died when Peter’s oldest brother was nine, and the other two families rallied round to help the widow. I’ve told you this, haven’t I? All twelve of these first cousins married and had kids, usually rather liberally—Peter you may remember has four—and most of them have also had kids and all of these people show up for major clan gatherings. They’re also all terrific^ talkers. I’m an only child and eight people in a bell tower seems to me a claustrophobic multitude.
Fortunately there were only about thirty of them there yesterday. Only. Thirty.
^ In some cases one might possibly be forgiven for saying terrible
** Also memorable for the fact that the extremely fancy and expensive country house hotel I paid weight-bearing-attic-floor prices to for the privilege of giving a party^ at got way too much stuff wrong and then were grand and overbearing when I protested after the fact.^^ Peter and I haven’t been back. Sigh. There pretty well are only three really nice restaurants in this area, and that was one of them, and it’s the only one with views over Hampshire countryside to die for. We’re going to have to have Peter’s 90th sailing up the Orinoco on the last tramp steamer in commission to avoid more restaurant feuds, which had been (more or less) the original plan for his 80th, to confuse the party issue. But the family complained. They’ll probably complain again if we try it on next time. I’m also not sure how high the standard is in tramp steamer galleys. Nor am I sure hellhounds will really enjoy doing laps around the deck.
^ Uggggh. Parties are an awful idea. They should be banned.+ I’m hoping youngest brother will go rogue and refuse to have one. I was weak, and allowed expectations to direct my course.
+ Start with publishing parties.~
~ Yes, I really do have ME, it’s not a carefully-nurtured myth to get me out of author tours and publishing parties. But with all its wide greedy range of frelling ratbaggery the ME has one or two small advantages.
^^ They had their cheque, what the hell did they care? How many times am I going to throw an 80th birthday party for my husband? Grrrrrrr.
*** Except for bell ringing.^ And piano lessons.^^ And singing.^^^ And hellhound-hurtling.^^^^ And chocolate-eating. ^^^^^
^ This morning’s astonishing feat was ringing up the five in peal. Ringing up in peal—several bells all being hauled up at once, beautifully spaced one from another so you get a ding ding ding ding ding sound, it’s the ‘beautifully’ part that’s the bane and scourge—is harder than ringing down; ringing down, bringing the bell from mouth-up and ready for full-circle ringing to mouth-down again and safe to leave hanging, inertia is much more your friend. And the nearer the front of the queue you are, ringing up or down, and barring leading, which is the worst, the (comparatively) easier it is. Edward had called for the back six which would put me on the three which is a nice safe bell, and then everybody decided we were going to ring the front six . . . which suddenly put me on the five. Eeeep. I have no idea why I succeeded keeping my place.
^^ I was nearly two hours on the piano today, bashing the beastly Capriol. There are pathetically few notes involved . . . they’re just in a funny order. This probably is contributing to my shatterment. But I’d been planning to have a lot of two-hours-at-the-piano days during my week off.
^^^ I’m into the hyperventilating stage over Fear No More. Tuesday? I have to sing this Tuesday?
^^^^^ It’s still raining.
^^^^^^ Mmmmmm.
† You moron, what do you think you’re DOING? [Scamper! Frolic! Caper! Frisk!]
†† Yes, I did have visions of spending my birthday lying on the sofa with Peter bringing me glasses of champagne. And I had warned Fiona I might have to cancel at the last minute, which wouldn’t have been the first time.
††† Or possibly pegasi
‡ Yes. The medal is being cast even as I write.
‡‡ Even if your husband has too sodding many brothers so you have to keep going to these things. I’m not dragging him to a long series of significant sibling birthdays.
‡‡‡ If you like parties.
§ Cotswolds villages. They’re all out of a Hollywood set designer’s fevered imagination of Olde Englande.
§§ I like most^ of these people . . . individually.
^ And if you’re going to get on me for the ‘most’ . . . Piffle. Hellgoddesses don’t believe in liking people. It gives them ideas above their station.
§§§ Apologies for this entry being even more scatterbrained than usual.
¤ Including things like more housecleaning. More filing. More planting of spring bulbs.^
^ Although the likelihood of being washed away does dim enthusiasm a bit. Can you keep your head above water while you feel around on the bottom of the new sea that was once your back garden for somewhere to stick your trowel? Did I mention it was chucking it down yesterday for the party . . . and for the commuting to and from the party?
¤¤ Okay, smarty. What is the possessive of ‘brothers-in-law’? http://www.mpcfaculty.net/essc/handouts/Possessive.htm
Yes, that’s what I thought, but it looks horrible.
Guest post by Annagail
Easy Ways to Make Your Head Explode– or, Thoughts on Common Pitfalls of Learning to Sing
Singers hear the occasional comment about how voice lessons seem very touchy-feely compared to the average music lesson. A violin teacher may say, “Use more vibrato from your wrist!” and even if an observing student has no idea what vibrato is, at least one’s wrist is pretty well identifiable. But in a voice lesson, one is much more apt to hear something like “Feel your inner yawn.” In layman’s terms, “’Scuse me, what?”
Singing is unfortunately rather different than playing an instrument. One can put one’s hand on a trumpet or a piano–you can see how it’s put together, you can see where you need to put your fingers. Singing isn’t like that. Much teaching is done in imagery rather than in specific instructions, because everything you do is based on feel*, with next to no dependence on sight**. Becoming aware of what one is feeling (and where) is one of the higher obstacles for a beginning singer–noticing what parts of the body move when one breathes isn’t something to which one typically pays attention, but it’s absolutely vital in order to be able to have conscious control over breath.
Control. That’s a word you hear a lot when it comes to singing, but in reality beginning singers have to learn how to be uncontrolled rather than how to control more. Control (and it only EVER applies to the breath) is something that you only get to learn after you have learned how to consistently release so much air in a phrase that you feel lightheaded***. Before that? Don’t worry about running out of air. Forget about holding anything in. Let go. Feel the place where you breathe and learn how to relax the muscles around it. A good inhale should feel like an almost instantaneous muscular release and expansion around the entirety of your midsection, including your lower back (and pelvis, if you’re female) rather than a desperate gasp or a sucking sensation. Your abdomen should not go in when you inhale, but should release out. Learning how to find and release all the various muscles involved takes time$.
Time. Learning to sing well takes time, and a lot of it. Truth be told, learning to sing is really more about unlearning and uncontrolling and initially feels almost as discombobulating as learning to swim on land. Undoing habits takes a lot longer than learning new ones–ask anyone who’s ever tried to stop biting their fingernails. It doesn’t help that there are several singing processes that work in almost direct contradiction to general consensus and initial training sometimes makes you feel like you’ve sprouted extra body parts–the aforementioned learning to breathe, for instance^, which can make you feel like something about to come on the scene in Alien. The idea itself is initially laughable–you’ve been breathing quite well all your life so far; teaching you to breathe seems as ridiculous as teaching your heart to beat. But what you’re really doing is finding and activating muscles that theoretically are under conscious control but which you’ve never actually paid any attention to, which gives you more control over how much air you have available and how much you can use at one time.
Breathing is about putting more of your body under conscious control; actually getting a good sound is about realizing what parts of your voice should NOT be under your conscious control. Most people are self-conscious about how they think they sound and worry about producing a sour note. Ironically, the student’s general cure for this (listening to oneself in order to catch the sour note as soon as it comes) is actually often the cause of said difficulty. What the singer usually fails to realize is that you CANNOT hear yourself as the audience hears you. You hear “private resonance,” vibrations through blood and bone and flesh. Sound waves only come back to you as an afterthought. The rest of the world hears “public resonance,” through air waves. If you’ve ever heard a recording of the same sound heard through water and through air, you’ll know what a difference a medium makes. It’s the same way with the human voice–it is physically impossible for you to know what you sound like to other people without the aid of a recording device. I repeat: it is physically impossible for you to know what you sound like to other people without the aid of a recording device. In fact, when you try to monitor your sound, your jaw starts to hold tension (unnecessary tension is death to singing), your tongue gets tight, your larynx goes up to about the back of your throat (when you want it nice and relaxed and low), and your volume decreases to a third or a fourth of what it was prior to you listening to/monitoring your sound.
This is big news. It is VITAL to you singing well. You cannot allow yourself to be concerned with the sound that comes out of you–because you can’t control it anyway! What you can control is what you feel, not what you hear. Unfortunately, ultimately the way to fix it is to learn how not to be afraid of what comes out of your mouth, to give yourself permission to crack or sound bad or be wrong. That’s why you have to be able to trust your teacher–a good teacher will never make fun of you or call you down for being daring. There are a few quick fixes that can help you feel what your body does when it’s free in this way–putting your fingers in your ears while singing helps, but only if you can pay attention to what your body’s doing and focus on making it do the same thing when your fingers are not in your ears^^. Oftentimes finding something aside from your own sound to focus on will also help–you can pay attention to your breath, or to how your jaw feels, or to where the energy of your sound is going. Notice I say “pay attention to,” not “stress out about.” Disinterested but active participation is what we’re looking for, no worry, no blame, just awareness. Learning how to consciously relax your jaw if it’s tight takes time; the first step is realizing that you do it.
Ultimately, though, singing requires being brave. It’s jumping off the high dive, it’s skydiving, it’s being Daedalus%. Singing with a completely released sound feels to me like flying, and the first time it’s every bit as frightening because you feel that you are not in control of the sound that is coming out of your mouth. It’s an extrabodily experience; it’s almost mystical, because it does not feel like the sound is coming from you. As far as you’re concerned, you’re just standing there with your mouth open breathing out. It’s perfectly normal to want to grab that sound again, to stuff it back down into the deep dark recesses of your body where you can quantify it, where it’s a known quality and it may not be great but at least you know what it is. It’s normal to want to keep your feet on the ground, but in order to sing you have to fly.
Sometimes when you fly, you’re Daedalus. Other times, you’re Icarus. And that’s why it’s absolutely vital to keep judgment out of your mind, particularly when you think about your practice sessions. You have to not be hard on yourself if you’re not doing this particular passage just right, or you can’t seem to kick that tight jaw–you think you’ve got it licked but then it sneaks right back up and bites you in the tukkus. Saying “I should be doing this better, I’m a bad singer, I should have learned this by now” does absolutely nothing to help you–all it does is link negative thoughts and feelings to your practice sessions. Singing takes time. And very often people coast along on a plateau, not seeming to make any progress, when BOOM! Something finally takes. One day, you walk onstage and you realize that even if you have control over nothing else, you can think about your breath. You throw your arms open and suddenly that high note is coming out clear as a bell and feels like it’s coming from the ceiling. You move your hand a certain way and suddenly there’s twice as much resonance, twice as much sound.# And you never know when it’s going to happen. It could happen next year, it could happen tomorrow–all it takes is persistence and a willingness to relax and allow yourself to take as much time as you need to learn this technique.
Everything mentioned in here is easier said than done. It’s scary, and it’s hard, and it’s completely mind-blowing. Getting frustrated is part of the game. So is wishing you’d taken up Russian or blacksmithing. Or Russian blacksmithing. But the end result is completely worth it.
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*and also because you’re often trying to change things about your body that aren’t necessarily under your direct, conscious control–so the teacher will start chucking imagery at you until s/he finds some that sticks.
**It is true that mirrors are often used for various purposes, such as checking one’s posture, alignment, and mouth position, but one does not perform in front of a mirror.
***New voice students–BELIEVE ME. Don’t try to control the outflow of your air before your teacher tells you that you’re using too much. Trying to do something to prove you’re advanced before you actually are is a good exercise in futility. You want to advance faster? Learn how to inhale correctly and then try to use as much air as possible in each individual line. Your teacher will tell you when you’re using too much. If you’re not lightheaded at the end of a song, you’re not doing it right. (Spoken from being a smart-@$$ed kid who tried stuff before she was ready for it.)
$Random comment–if you’re trying to learn to release abdominal muscles and you have a “six pack”, you’re going to have a very, very hard time. Muscle tone is caused from having constantly tense muscles. Our society finds this beautiful, but it’s highly counterproductive in singing because you can’t un-tense said muscles. So feel free to do crunches (having strong muscles is a good thing!), but try not to bulk up your stomach if you want to sing.
^I laugh when I say “beginning”, because breathing is something that it takes a LONG time to learn, and even professional singers have to pay attention to it.
^^Don’t do this too often, or else you’ll get used to what you sound like with your fingers in your ears and listen anyway. It’s a quick fix and changes things up and allows you to not listen. The goal is for you to not listen all the time.
%Daedalus and Icarus, for those whose Greek mythology is rusty
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daedalus
#All of these experiences have happened to me personally. Not everybody works this way–I have a friend who is more of the slow-incline learner. I maintain that it just takes stuff longer to penetrate my thick skull, whereas stuff trickles into hers faster. I get my information all at once, she gets hers a little at a time. Neither of us is ‘right’.