Disaster, devastation and despair
BLONDEL IS LEAVING.
Yes. He beat out his rival, he was offered the job, AND HE TOOK IT.
::: Wailing* and rending of garments :::
. . . Silence then falls.
Pull yourself together, McKinley, you have a blog post to write! Write. Right. Um.
I was already badly short of sleep and not up for a lot of outrageous fortune’s slings and arrows before this grievous and staggering blow fell.** I’m not sleeping well anyway and at eight thirty this morning*** the builders across the road started up. I have no idea what they were doing, but it involved a lot of scraping and hammering. So you get husssha husssha husssha for a while followed by blam blam blam. Then more husssha husssha. Then more blam blam.
Followed by AAAAAAUGH emanating from the bedroom over the way, like the first Mrs Rochester from her attic.
And then . . . how bad can a day get† . . . Blondel is leaving! Is leaving! Noooooooooo!
Yeeeeeeeeeeees!
It’s not till September, he said in an attempt to be soothing††, we have time to do lots of stuff before then.
I guess. Snivel.
I mean . . . voice lessons. I’ve had many, many idiotic ideas in my long and frequently misspent life†††, but voice lessons have to be fairly high on the idiocy list. If I had any sense‡ I would say, September, that’s cool, I’ll have been taking voice lessons exactly a year, I’ve had a go, I’ve learnt enough to be going on with since my only even half cogent reason for taking voice lessons is that I like writing songs and want to know something about how singing feels, I’ll STOP now. Ask me again in August, but I don’t want to stop. Singing, like pretty much everything I’ve ever tried, only gets more interesting the more you do it.
I said to Blondel, I don’t suppose you know another nice kindly patient voice teacher who doesn’t mind wasting his/her time on someone who may conceivably make it some day to the back row of the chorus in a small amateur production of something undemanding, do you?‡‡
What with all the disaster and despair I barely have the heart to tell you that I frelling made it through Purcell’s frelling Evening Hymn (nearly) with Blondel playing the accompaniment, which is to say not playing what I’m singing to keep me from losing my nerve and falling off my line. He also said at the end that it is a remarkably unhelpful accompaniment, now that he comes to be looking at it rather than at keeping me shovelled back where I belong. Hey, he’s leaving in September, he could say anything.‡‡‡
But I was still pleased. Now if only I had a voice. Now if only I had a voice teacher after September. . . .
* * *
* Not to say caterwauling. Well, yes, let’s say caterwauling.
** KA-CHUNG. Like the guillotine blade. I have a great affection for Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, not least because of the highly effective, and unexpected in grand opera, Grand Guignol final scene. I’ve talked about this here before, haven’t I? It’s the French Revolution, and our Carmelite nuns are standing on queue waiting for their turn at the axe. And they’re singing, of course, because this is opera. And every now and then there’s a wa-thunk from the orchestra . . . and one fewer voice singing. First time I heard it I thought, you’ve got to be kidding. But no. Not only is everybody dying, which is of course perfectly normal in the last act of an opera^^, but you hear the guillotine blade falling every time. Wa-thunk. Golly. Yes, okay, I love it. The song they’re singing is creepy enough^^^, and the occasional wa-thunk punctuation makes my hair stand on end, however often I hear it.
I listen to Radio Three all the time anyway~ and I usually hear Michael Berkeley’s Private Passions at noon on Sundays. He talks to a different famous person every week about their musical private passions. This week was Bernard Longley, Roman Catholic Archbishop of Birmingham. And one of his choices was . . . the last scene of Poulenc’s Dialogues of the Carmelites, with a lot of Roman Catholic nuns getting their heads cut off with personalised wa-thunks from the orchestra. Hmmmmmm.
^ Despite my dislike of the hysterical little twit of a heroine. That she pulls it together at the end is better than nothing but she didn’t have to be such a GIRL till the last five minutes.
^^ Of course I’m exaggerating. That’s what I do.
^^^ ‘We’re so happy to be martyrs, tra la la la la’
~ Except when it’s jazz or (invisible) talking heads
*** Which is, you realise, about 4:30 a.m. for normal diurnal humans
† I was going to say a bloodless day, but . . . I have no idea what I caught my hand on—I remember a brief sharp sensation, but I’m a rose gardener, I’m accustomed to brief sharp sensations—but this morning while hurtling I looked down and discovered Blood Everywhere, including all over Chaos, who’s the pale fawn one of course. He was briefly a kind of maroon brindle. Sigh. If I’d only realised I could have gone and dripped on an altar to the deity of voice teachers.
†† I considered testing his mettle—he’s still awfully young—on disintegrating middle-aged women but then I thought, naah. Let someone else do it.
††† I could always turn over a new leaf. Naah. Let someone else do that too.
‡ You don’t really need to brace yourselves for a lack of sense, do you?
‡‡ He said, I’ll think about it. He also said that I was a rewarding student and that he would have no hesitation in recommending me to anyone. I think he’s mad, of course, and I’m very sorry that the average voice student standard is so doleful, but it’s another tick in the book against the box labelled ‘obstinate grind’. You keep showing up, you keep trying to sing, you get points. Why hasn’t anybody written a stirring ballad to heroic obstinacy yet? Obviously it needs to be done. Hmmmmmm. . . . .
‡‡‡ I also said, okay, I want to sing Dido’s Lament before you go.
comments
Please join the discussion at Robin McKinley's Web Forum.