Blondel, con’t
It’s been streaming rain again and the mud on the fields has got deeper quicker than I was expecting.* I tweeted about this earlier: I put a clean pair of jeans on this morning—so that I could visit Blondel in his beige-carpeted** house without shedding any countryside and making whoever does the hoovering hate me***—and the hellhounds promptly discovered the best stick in the universe!!!, half-buried in sticky Hampshire clay, and insisted on my enjoying it with them. Sigh. I don’t suppose Blondel really counts the pawprints.
I have not, of course, spent nearly as much time on my singing this week as I planned to. But I’ve certainly spent time. I’m also working on three different songs—Purcell’s Evening Hymn and the two Finzis, Fear No More and Lover and His Lass. I spent the most time on the Evening Hymn because Blondel gave it to me as I disappeared into the PEGASUS page proofs and I’ve never offered it even as much focus and attention as I am capable of giving a singing piece. Gah. But I’ve now sung those frelling twiddles† till I (foolishly) thought I knew them reasonably well. Not, I have to say, greatly assisted by Purcell’s apparent laissez-faire attitude toward number of beats in a bar: cheez louise he chooses a frelling time signature like 3/2 and then starts chucking extra quavers/eighth notes in when he feels like it. Maybe we’re not supposed to notice? Cheez. But that turns out to be (Blondel says) what the teeny weeny notes above the staff are: editorial remarks about how to get around creative irregularities. Okay, that’ll help me this week.
I don’t know why I’m in such a good mood. It was pretty bad. Blondel was very sympathetic††, saying that the piano is actually doing rather dramatic things in its quiet subversive way, and that I am far from the first person who has found that the accompaniment pulls them off their own line.††† Accompaniment! HA! The piano is your adversary, your rival! And yeah. I lost. Sigh. I can’t do the twiddles with it going, nanny nanny boo boo sucks sucks sucks! The twiddles are way too alarming all by themselves.
So I have to do it some more this week and go in better armed next week.‡ It felt positively soothing after the Battle of the Twiddles to revert to some Finzi—which I can’t sing either, but you might say I can not sing it less. It turns out that Blondel had sung Fear No More the Heat o’ the Sun for his intersing at Canterbury/etc, which boggles my mind—I suppose that level of familiarity makes it easier to teach, but how can he stand listening to someone bungle it the way I bungle it?? Teachers are amazing beings.‡‡
But I do know why I’m in a good mood in spite of all this. Remember I told you last week I sang one or two notes that were not absolutely terrible? I sang a few more today. Blondel is somehow managing to generate something almost resembling a voice out of . . . mud and hellhound hair. And metaphor. I don’t in the least understand the process; most of the things he says to me make no rational sense whatsoever; to the extent that it’s anything, it’s me trying to copy whatever it is that he’s doing, since he always illustrates. And he can clearly hear‡‡‡ what I’m doing because his latest insane metaphor always addresses whatever I’m doing . . . uh . . . least well. But I sang G sharp today. Dido’s Lament here I come.
And because life is like that . . . when I finally gave up waiting for it to stop raining this evening and took hellhounds out for a sprint, we charged back to the cottage from the mews, and I turned the radio on while I blotted sopping hellhounds, because I always turn the radio on, and . . . a very familiar intro began to roll out of the speaker and . . . it was Purcell’s Evening Hymn. Hellhounds had to hang around unblotted while I froze in place and listened. It really is the most glorious thing. And I’m learning to sing it.§
* * *
* Thus I found out that my old emerald-green All Stars are no longer waterproof on the bits that are supposed to be covered by rubber.^ There’s a certain amount you can do about holes in the bottom with waterproof liners, but when they start cracking around the edges you’ve kind of had it.
^ Speaking of All Stars, my Blondies are still arranged fetchingly in their (open) box and . . . lying on the little table beside the piano. Peter asked me in a mild, long-suffering manner how long I was planning on leaving them there. They’re art, I said. It’s an installation. Oh, said Peter, still mildly. I looked away before I had to see him rolling his eyes.
I was actually planning on wearing them to my voice lesson today. Inspirationally. But get them WET? Are you KIDDING?
** And hellhound-free. They have a small, polite cat who occasionally wanders in to give a demonstration on how something should be sung. I think the general drift is: tuna tuna tuna tuna tuna, my dish is eeeeeeeeeempty. TUUUUUNA.
*** I wish more urgently than usual to be on my best behaviour since the Future Remains in Doubt—I don’t want to contribute even the weight of a hellhound hair tipping him toward leaving. His second intersing for the Coventry/York/Westminster job is next Tuesday—and he has it on Good Authority that the short list is very short indeed: himself and one other. He and his wife—let’s call her Jasmine^—are going up this weekend for her to admire the festoons of picturesque tourists dangling from every original gas lamp. Jasmine! You’re not impressed! Remember there’s no garden! Think of that nice little clematis twining up your doorframe in Mauncester^^, and the patio out back^^^! Think of the lack of tourists here! —Barring the occasional Lost and Miserable who turned right at the statue of Titus Oates the Perjurer instead of left. And the sporadic tides of dreamy Americans who think everything is quaint because it’s England.+
^ I don’t think Blondel had a wife, did he? Or she’s not in any of the more obvious stories. But Jasmine sounds like the kind of name Blondel might have married.
^^ With which I am good friends. We commune while I wait for Blondel to fetch the parking permit. It is covered in big fat buds right now. We agreed that we do not want any more night frosts.
^^^ where you do not want to sit if your husband is teaching a voice lesson because his studio faces that way. . . .
+ Yep. I was one of those. In my heart of hearts, still am, when I’m not cursing the moron in the SUV who just cut in front of me, or the latest rise in the council tax, or the cellophane tape, which the British (apparently) cannot make to save their lives. Fortunately there appears to be an excellent trade agreement with 3M.
† We do not use the c-word^
^ Relax, will you? Coloratura
†† Thinking to himself, at Coventry/York/Westminster I’m going to screen ’em before I agree to take any students.
††† Possibly my most vivid memory of being a member of various choirs many, many years ago is the diabolical way that the other voices try to confuse you. You remember my current goal of back row of the chorus in some amateur theatrical^? The middle of the back row of the chorus, with people singing the same thing as me on either side. And we’d better not have to move around much either.
^ some day, which is to say not now
‡ larynxed? —What I should really do is take it to Oisin on Friday. But then I’d have to . . . sing! Where he could . . . hear me!
‡‡ And it still amuses the hell out of me^ that at twenty-seven Blondel is a kind, patient, sympathetic, perceptive teacher . . . while at fifty-seven I’m a cantankerous cow who panics every time she remembers that one of the aspects of Deputy Ringing Master is that if I am ever stuck with running a practise some day I will have to teach our beginners
^ Well, not entirely out of me. I am the hellgoddess, after all
‡‡‡ Poor man
§ Although you might want to make that “sing”
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