Tirra lira
. . . by the river, sang Sir Lancelot.* I hope he has a better voice than I do. Elizabeth Moon @emoontx and I have been having a little fun on Twitter about singing—those of you with long memories** may remember that it was a long comment from EMoon about having a voice lesson from her choir director that tipped me over the voice-lesson edge last summer, the difference being that she evidently has a voice worth developing and I don’t. I just have a strange lust for humiliation. Well, and voice lessons are doing what they’re supposed to do—they’re giving me a greater and more flexible understanding of what singing is. Whether this is going to have any real effect on my song-composing . . . feh, who knows? *** But I’m having a good time, and that counts for something.
My voice lesson today was way more fun than I was expecting. I went in there absolutely prepared for disaster. I’ve been thumping myself with the Evening Hymn and didn’t seem to be getting ANYWHERE.† My best guess is just that I haven’t tackled anything this early before and there’s more difference in mindset than I had realised.†† One of the surprising things is that the breathing is not (much of) a problem. Almost everything else is, but not the breathing. I said this to Blondel and he said, your breathing has revolutionised since you started last summer. —Yes. That’s even true.†††
But while today I was still horribly dependent on Blondel illegally playing my line to keep me on it I have some hope that by next week I’ll be able to let him play the accompaniment and twiddle away on my own. Just like James Bowman. Well, sort of. And we have to get back to Finzi.
But . . . oh gods I have to sing for Oisin on Friday.
* * *
* http://www.poetry-online.org/tennyson_the_lady_of_shalott.htm
Okay, sue me. I love The Lady of Shalott. I’m reasonably sure that I read the poem first; I was always reading reading reading when I was a kid, and it was years before the concept of pictures that other people had already painted for you—that you didn’t have to make up for yourself—really registered. Then, of course, like millions of other soppy preteens I fell horribly in love with the PreRaphaelites^ . . . and the truth is I’ve never really recovered, although I’ve stopped apologising for it. During my black leather Harley Davidson jacket phase I had so many chips on my shoulder some of them had to fall off^^, and the PreRaphs—and Tennyson—were among them.
But now I’m old^^^ I’ve stopped apologising for thinking Tennyson is a great poet too. This evening I have had the delicious experience of wanting my Collected Tennyson . . . and going into the sitting room and immediately laying my hand on it~. I needed to check on the spelling of tirra lira and was, predictably, immediately ensorcelled into rereading the whole damn poem. I then compounded this error by spending most of the next hour rereading Maud. Anybody else out there Marked for Life by Tennyson’s Maud, long before Night of the Living Dead, let alone Blair Witch?~~ It’s an extraordinary piece of work, and scared me silly when I was nine or so, not only because I couldn’t follow half of it.~~~
^ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Lady_of_Shalott_(painting) : yes, the Waterhouse one that is, I believe, one of the best-selling posters of all time.+ But much as I love that painting, for representations of the Lady of Shalott I prefer this one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:HuntShallotlarge.jpg Generally speaking I’m not a big Holman Hunt fan, barring that he’s a PreRaph and I’m therefore obliged to dote; I think his colours are garish.++ But I like this one for the energy of it. She’s pissed off and she’s not gonna take it any more. Reading masses of Victorian literature at an early age probably did me a lot of harm in terms of believing that a girl can grow up to have her own adventures—all those drooping heroines, GAAAAAH—and the PreRaph Brotherhood+++ were no help. I tended to fall on anything that looked like it might be an exception with a desperate glee. It is a combination of the Holman Hunt painting, the Loreena McKennitt++++ song, and the original poem that will, some day, produce Red Sonja of Shalott, which is still festering in my back files, and emerges to bite my dreams occasionally. But first there’s RATPEG and then there’s ALBION and after that . . . I’m not sure. But it’s on the list.
+ I have it on a kitchen magnet. . . .
++ The Awakening Conscience? Ewwww.
+++ http://www.amazon.co.uk/Pre-Raphaelite-Sisterhood-Jan-Marsh/dp/0704301695 Yes, I know. And if you type in ‘PreRaph sisterhood’ on google you get a sheaf of sites. But that is now. This was then.
++++ http://www.quinlanroad.com/
^^ Despite the added width those black leather shoulders gave me
^^^ I’ve said this before and I’ll say it again: the wrinkles and the sags and the slowings down and the weird aches in places you didn’t know had the equipment for aching and the loosenings and losses are a big drawback, but everything has drawbacks, and being old beats hell out of being young.+ Penelope and I were talking about this yesterday. The chief drawback, it seems to me, is the lack of future. When you’re young you get to look forward to being old. When you’re old . . . well. It does focus the mind. If you’re going to try it do it now. Voice lessons, say.
+ Some restrictions apply, of course, like the guarantee says. You can really screw up, or you can have incurably bad luck. But for the rest of us, old is better.
~ Bless you, Fiona, Queen of Alphabetization and the Rendering of Heaps.
~~ Neither of which I’ve ever seen, perhaps partly because I was early Marked for Life by Maud by Alfred Lord Tennyson.
~~~ Still can’t. I always assumed Maud herself died, as well as her revolting brother and the fruit loop narrator’s dad, whose gruesome end begins the poem (‘I hate the dreadful hollow behind the little wood . . . ’) and warns you that this isn’t one of your hearts-and-flowers Victorian ballads+ But it doesn’t really say one way or another. I think. Our nutter just sails off into the Crimean (?) sunset there at the end to an unknown fate.
+ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g1hCN3-COYk A great deal can perhaps be explained by my not being prepared, at a tender age, to encompass both the original poem and the fact that someone managed to excerpt a bit of it and do this to it. Don’t go, Maud! He’s a nutter! —Although your revolting brother did strike the first blow. ‘. . . . And he struck me, madman, over the face . . . And a million horrible bellowing echoes broke/ From the red-ribb’d hollow behind the wood/ And thunder’d up into Heaven the Christless code/ That must have life for a blow . . .’ I’d forgotten that the brother, dying: ‘ “The fault was mine,” he whisper’d, “fly!” ’ . . . which our poor nutter does, though little joy it gives him: ‘. . . And my heart is a handful of dust/ And the wheels go over my head/ And my bones are shaken with pain/ For into a shallow grave they are thrust/ Only a yard beneath the street/ And the hoofs of the horses beat, beat/ The hoofs of the horses beat . . . . I thought the dead had peace, but it is not so;/ To have no peace in the grave, is that not sad?/ But up and down and to and fro,/ Ever about me the dead men go . . .’
** Who clearly need something better to be using them for
*** What I am uneasily aware it’s also doing is making me a terrible snob about other people singing—professionals, I mean, not chumps like me. Which is a self-indulgent rant for another post. But . . . it is also a way of developing your own from-the-inside-out experience of music, which is a good thing too.
† I’ve been reduced to listening to Alfred Deller on YouTube because he sings it almost a minute slower than anybody else. Not a big Deller fan I’m afraid. But his notorious laggardliness is a boon to the feebler student.
†† That and the frelling 3/2 time signature. By the way, you guys who said ‘coloratura’ to me about the Purcell twiddles . . . Blondel started to say today: this is almost colora— STOP, I said. I AM NOT READY TO HEAR THIS.
††† Yaaay Blondel.
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