Your Body Is Your Instrument, Chapter 412
I sustained another emotional body blow this weekend and OF COURSE my voice decided to have a hissy fit. But it was a new kind of hissy fit. I opened my mouth cautiously to start doing warm ups which include singing things like Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes which always requires singing the first line again after my voice figures out what key it’s in and where the frelling tonic is.* I also sing a lot on ‘ah’ rather than words because it’s one less thing to worry about. Rather to my surprise I seemed to be making a reasonable amount of noise.** So it took me till I was trying to practise Jesu Joy of Man’s Desiring to discover that as soon as I was trying to learn something . . . I was totally, fantastically, diabolically FLAT. Not every note and not precisely the same amount of flat, or even I with my limited skills might have been able to adjust, just . . . flat. Is there no end to the humiliations of Your Body Is Your Instrument.*** Apparently not.
So I went in to my voice lesson today all bent round in a knot of self-abasement—particularly because I’d freaked myself out so badly on Jesu that I didn’t want to sing it for Nadia at all—and told her that I was all flat and horrible and was there a particular piece of the carpet she would like me to gnaw on as penalty? And she said, because she is (a) an excellent teacher (b) bird-witted or (c) on drugs, flat? Oh, but that may be a good sign.
It may be what?
I was so surprised she wasn’t garrotting me with a handy piece of clothesline for being the least ept of her students with the most ridiculous excuses, that I’m afraid I missed the details of her justification of this extraordinary statement. It has something to do with the fact that as some bit of you changes, other bits of you have to adapt. I’ve also been having these funny glitches which really do sound like I’m jumping my sprockets, when a note will suddenly flare like a bad radio signal, or, as Nadia suggested, a horse throwing a buck. That’s great, she said. Never mind what it sounds like.
Er—
No, she repeated, it’s all good. You’re loosening up serially. This is normal.† All the pieces will come back into alignment, I promise.
Muddlehampton Choir practise this Thursday. I’m frelling petrified.††
I did however ring a touch of Stedman doubles including The Bad Super-Wiggly Coathanger single tonight at South Desuetude. Although it took me two tries. And we will cast a veil of SHADOWS over my St Clements†††. . . .
* * *
* I do a lot of what you might call pre-warming-up out hurtling^ and doing stuff like hanging laundry and washing up^^.
^ I lead such a rich, full life. I also listen to my Japanese podcasts out hurtling+. Which of these deeply absorbing sub- or super-activities wins as that hurtle’s, or that stretch of that hurtle’s companion depends almost entirely on location and population density. Now that I’m getting louder I have to examine my surroundings with even greater care for anyone who might conceivably hear me.
On the other hand, it’s a lot easier to snap off singing when there is a sudden surge of Aggressive Off Lead Dog(s). I am so negatively conditioned that a gorgeous sunny Sunday—as yesterday was—makes my heart sink at the prospect that everyone and his/her/their Aggressive Off Lead Dog(s) will also be out enjoying the unnaturally beneficent weather and the glorious countryside. We had a particularly redolent example of this yesterday. We were heading back toward civilisation (?) again. As we neared the road I could see a mob of people strolling along it . . . and at least one dog. Off lead. On the road. Now this is a little back country road, but it’s quite a busy little back country road and it has some very nasty blind corners on it. Hellhounds are not only on lead but on short lead when we walk along that road. As the dog came opposite the footpath gate we were heading toward it stopped. And looked toward us. Thoughtfully. It’s a frelling Staffordshire.++ I love Staffies, and many of them are sweethearts, but they were bred for fighting, for godssake, and even the ones that are totally sweet and gentle with people may very well be dog-aggressive. Hellhounds and I stop. Dog continues to stare at us thoughtfully. I was about to squeak—speaking of situations that shut your voice down—something at the humans like ‘please call your dog’+++ when one of them glanced over his shoulder and said, oh, come along, Attila dear. Which Attila, of course, ignored. Attila, on the contrary, began to amble in our direction. It is remarkable—often as I have had the opportunity to observe this effect—just how much of your life does flash before your eyes in those few seconds before battle is engaged.
Hellhounds and I began backing up, very slowly. This usually does work with a dog that just wants to puff himself out a bit and prove what a hard boy he is, and footpaths are usually neutral territory. It worked in this case.++++ After the dog had backed us up far enough to prove that we were afraid of him—and I always figure it’s a bad sign when hellhounds are willing to slink away from another dog—about the fifth time that Mr Microbe Brain called him, he went. But a disobedient (aggressive) off lead dog on a busy road. Dear frelling gods.
Anyway. I missed a lot of my podcast during that little episode. I had to turn it off till my heart rate and brain waves returned to something resembling normal. And then I had to zap it backward a long way.
+ As I USED and eventually WILL AGAIN listen to physics and maths (and history and biography#). There isn’t anyone out there who also uses audible.uk on her (or his) iPhone and can tell me how to listen to more than one book without losing her place in either one or annoying the app into de-downloading the files?
# No, not fiction. I read fiction anyway. Having brisk, leg-propelled blood circulating in my brain is an opportunity not to be missed to get it to learn something.
++ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Staffordshire_Bull_Terrier
+++ I’m so polite. We were once being pursued by a large male Labrador—precisely the fashionable style of large rectangular object with a head that looks like a four-slice toaster that has bloody ruined Labs—and I had already said, followed by shouted, PLEASE CALL YOUR DOG to no response whatsoever. At about the point when my leg was going to disappear down its slavering jaws as I attempted to fend it off the hellhounds I screamed CALL YOUR G*DD*M DOG! and the woman, who had been watching the show without making any faintest gesture or attempt to recall her Panzer division suddenly snapped to attention and said, Don’t swear at me!
++++ As it did with Panzer, above.
^^ Doing the dishes in American.
** This breathing from your gut thing is fabulous for your singing.^ I’d said to Nadia a fortnight or so ago that I thought it was interesting that this had suddenly opened up at pretty much the same time as my throat had, in the aftermath of quitting my tower. And she said that while there was undoubtedly a connection, from her vantage as teacher, she’d been expecting it to happen around now—that things do happen to a somewhat predictable pattern. OH DIRE FATE I’M PREDICTABLE.
^ Barring the relationship with your neighbours aspect.
*** But singing is fun, gods help me. This has indeed begun to plait itself into another cosh to beat myself with. Nadia can still get a better noise out of me than I can at home without her help. But because Nadia doesn’t think I’m hopeless I have something to lose in my lessons, so I do, maddeningly and involuntarily, go in there week after week slightly braced. Bracing doesn’t do your singing any good at all. So I can hear, sometimes, especially a song I also sing purely for fun, like my folk songs, and haven’t sung much for Nadia, that I am singing less freely for her than I do for the hellhounds. Today it was Down by the Salley Gardens. ARRRRRGH.
† OH DIRE FATE. I’M NORMAL.
†† Nadia said, I don’t suppose you’d consider . . . just enjoying it?
††† Which I’m going to have to ring on Thursday on handbells. ARRRRRRRRRRRGH.
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