Better. Yes.
I’m better. No, really. This time I really am better.
I had thought I went to bed last night at least a little more cheerful, even if I still couldn’t breathe and I think my back hurts quite so relentlessly and godsblattingly as much because of sleeping sitting up as because flu always makes me ache in places that the rest of the time I mostly forget are places, although the forgetting part does not in fact include my back, which has been a ratbag since I started falling off horses at the age of eleven. Anyway. I ache like fury, in both remembered and forgotten places, and the only reason to look forward to going to bed is to keep reading, since sleeping is an issue like global warming or the destruction of rainforest or the Republican nomination for president is an issue, and therefore if I was somehow feeling a little more cheerful this must be a good sign.
I got out of bed first try this morning.* I was, furthermore, hungry. How great is that. My stomach has been convinced that we have been involved in a highly unpleasant storm at sea the last week or so, involving much pitching and yawing, and has behaved accordingly. Calm seas today.** I got dressed. I had a cup of tea. I had an apple. I had . . .
. . . I wasn’t hungry any more. Oh. Well. Okay. Hellhounds and I went for a hurtle. We’ve been going out for about the right amount of time, the last few days, but somewhat less than the right amount of mileage. Today we were hitting nearer the mark. Yaay.***
Went down to the mews for lunch. I’m HUNGRY. And . . . I won’t eat anything. What. The. Frell. It’s like I woke up in the body of a hellhound or something.† Fed hellhounds. Even they are eating. Me . . . nah. Food. Nasty. OH COME ON. I’M OLD, I HAVE ME, I’M JUST GETTING OVER FLU, I NEED FOOD. I NEED PROTEIN.
Come any nearer with that olive/frond of dill/blameless scrambled egg and I will grow violent. Why yes, thank you, I would like another cup of very strong black tea.††
ARRRRGH.
So I was thinking, okay, what do you do when you have some stupid little cow who’s been sick for so long she’s forgotten how to eat? What might not only tempt her but provide something nearly enough resembling nutritional value as might draw her further back toward sanity . . . and protein? How about . . .
Carrot Cookies
Even with my history of telling you to judge your own ingredients and your own batter, this one is a bit mad. I’ve got notes all over the margins of wildly varying quantities. Note that both grated carrots and honey can have SPECTACULARLY variable water content. If your batter is runny, stop. Do not bake. Add flour or oatmeal. You want the batter sticky. These are drop cookies. They should behave like drop cookies.
2-3 c flour. Half wholewheat/meal is good
2 tsp baking powder
½ tsp baking soda
pinch to ¼ tsp salt
½ tsp cinnamon (I round it up pretty generously)
¼ tsp nutmeg
¼ tsp cloves
2-3 c quick oatmeal
1 c raisins (I like golden in this recipe)
1 c chopped nuts (I recommend pecans)
½ c soft butter
1 c grated (raw) carrots
½ to 1 c honey, depending on how sweet you want it, including how sweet your carrots are. No, really. Taste your batter.
2 eggs, beaten frothy
Mix the dry stuff together: I’d start with 2 c flour and 2 c oatmeal. I don’t think I ever start with the full cup of honey; I usually start around the scant ¾ c level. Now beat the honey into the butter. Usually I’m a little carefree about the whole ‘soft’ butter thing, but if you want to beat it into honey your life will be a lot easier if it’s genuinely soft. Then beat in the eggs. Then the carrots. Now beat in the flour mixture gradually, as your arm or your electric whizzer can stand the strain. (If you’re using electric, you want it on slow enough it doesn’t pulverize your raisins and nuts. Ask me how I know this. I think food processors are a mixed blessing and I’ve mostly gone back to the wooden spoon technique, but then I don’t bake a lot any more.) If the texture is right, taste. If you need to drizzle another ¼ c of honey into the batter, it’s not rocket science, just do it, and beat it in, maybe with a few more flakes of oatmeal. If it’s too runny . . . well, you’re going to need more honey too because of the more flour/oatmeal you’re going to be adding, and if you’re adding more than a sprinkly handful you’ll probably want to cast in a little extra cinnamon.††† Practical Physics in Your Kitchen. You just want instructions, right? Sorry.
Drop in biggish globs on greased cookie sheets. 350° F, about 15 minutes.
* * *
I wish to note for the record that I ate a large piece of fish for supper. I’m sure strength is pouring back into my valiant cells. Feh.
* * *
* There was some whimpering and clutching of bedposts, but we can’t have everything.
** I might even try putting my belt back on. This would be a good thing, since I’ve been eating so little the last few days my jeans are showing some alarming signs of falling off.
*** Mind you, I still can’t breathe, and I am terrifying on the phone.
† I thought I was having more trouble typing than usual . . .
†† How many hours before I can start on the cider?
††† Or you can shout, Wrangledabnag it!, and then pack the whole sloppy mess into a big baking dish. I think 13 x 9 will do it—I know I have done this but I didn’t bother to write down what size pan I used. It’ll probably take kind of forever to cook and be a trifle fragile. But it’ll taste just fine.
Frost
So after a (splendid) weekend of too much champagne and too little sleep and my usual over-effusive Monday, today of course I stayed home and applied myself strictly to work. Of course. Totally. Except for the mmph-mumble hours in the garden. . . .
And there’s going to be a vile, putrescent THRICE BLASTED FROST tonight. Atlas, bless him, who was here today working in Peter’s garden, rang Peter when he got home and had listened to the local weather report—Peter listens in the morning, and I play musical weather apps on Pooka, none of which is worth the 69p or £1.23 I paid for it, but watching a series of them being clueless helps to focus the slowly-waking morning mind. Atlas tends to be right: he lives on a farm, he’s a farmer’s son-in-law, and he knows how to do that sniffing-the-air thing about coming weather. If he agrees with the forecasters, you pay attention. Anyway. I was back in the cottage garden, out of earshot of either Pooka* or the landline** when Peter was trying to call me, contemplating saying the hell with it and planting my sweet peas, which are busy climbing out of the little plastic nets they arrived in, because potting on all those sweet peas is way too daunting a prospect.*** Providentially I was distracted by the six or a dozen little vases of things on various window sills that have grown roots and are wondering what happens now—I have this bad habit of putting prunings in water, just in case they’ll decide to grow roots: a surprising number of your average house plants will—and speaking of plants climbing out of what they’re in, I think some of my geranium cuttings have learned to abseil: there’s got to be GROUND around here somewhere.
So I was out in the cough-cough-cough potting shed† mixing compost and vermiculite and putting great fuzzy-rooted cuttings†† in small pots till dark.††† And dark is about two hours later than it was a fortnight ago‡. So IT’S SUDDENLY EIGHT O’CLOCK, and I race indoors to slam hellhounds into their harnesses‡‡, discover a phone message from Peter about a frost, howl in a singing-voice-threatening way, furiously put down a plastic sheet in the sitting room since the Winter Indoor-Jungle Table has been put away for the year, and start ferrying stuff through. . . .
We’d better have a frost tonight.
* * *
* For someone who is theoretically attached at the hip to her iPhone, I’m out of range far too often. Most of my friends with iPhones who live in jeans like me keep theirs in a pocket, but noooooooo. Maybe I just wear the wrong jeans.
** This is less surprising since the landline only actually rings when it’s in the mood. Poor Cormac rang the cottage three times before the landline deigned to let us know someone was trying to make contact. Hannah was beginning to worry: Cormac said he’d call around now. . . .
*** I’m saving my potting-on stamina for the 1,000,000,000 dahlia cuttings I always find I’ve ordered. One of the many conundrums of the gardener’s life is ordering early, before the things you particularly want have sold out, but which means you do your spring ordering while winter is clamped over the landscape like a giant iron hand, you’re convinced everything in your garden is dead and you need cheering up, or ordering late, when the mere presence of more daylight is beginning to cheer you up, enhanced by the fact that all kinds of dead things are producing small green (or occasionally red or purple) bumps and nodules^, and you are at least slightly less likely to order enough stuff to overfill Sissinghurst^^. But your nurseries will have run out of several of your absolute favourites without which your summer will be ruined, AND what you do successfully requisition will mostly arrive so late you will have gone to the garden centre and bought too much stuff there because you couldn’t wait any longer. On the whole I do better with choice A but it’s not a perfect system.
^ I’ve got a few gosh golly WOW ::cartwheels of joy:: surprises coming up . . . but I’m afraid to mention them officially for fear such acknowledgment and acceptance will promptly make them die after all.+
+ This probably also goes for mentioning that my snake’s-head fritillaries are coming into bloom. But I’m mentioning it anyway because if I don’t tell you something I will explode. They are slightly fussy, but we grew them at the old house, but I had been having disastrous luck with them for years at the cottage when Ajlr mentioned that the insanely evil red lily beetle also eats fritillaries . . . which I then realised was my problem too. But while I have conclusive evidence that both the weather gods and the unexpectedly-living-plants gods read imprudent blogs, I’m hoping that the insanely evil red lily beetle god does not.
^^ http://www.invectis.co.uk/sissing/
† Which is to say the all-purposes gardening shed, overflowing with pots, pot saucers, trays, tools, buckets of various sizes and materials, bags of compost and fertilizer and boxes and bottles of intensive plant food, my tiny barbeque and attendant charcoal, plastic sheets and fleece, etc etc etc etc ETC ETC ETC . . . and a robin’s nest. I was really excited when I saw that—I haven’t had a nest since the blog’s first year, and have barely had a robin. I know he’s around—there’s always one robin in a garden: they like gardens and they’re territorial—but the blackbirds have become such thugs that he’s kept a low profile. Sadly the nest seems to have been rejected, and I haven’t seen the happy couple in a while . . . but one robin is very much in evidence. I also spent time I might have been spending planting sweet peas hoicking out frelling mats of crocosmia and lily-of-the-valley^ around Queenie and Souvenir de la Malmaison and I had a small feathered opportunist at my elbow. I was reminded that when you’re outdoors the whirr of small flapping wings is quite pleasant.
^ Which are WEEDS in my garden. Bullying invasive WEEDS.
†† I also had one of my moments of hilarity and decided to do the full soft-wood cuttings nonsense from an obstinate house plant that has refused to die, the gallant thing, but needed serious pruning when I repotted it. Sometimes obstinate plants can be very obstinate and what the hell. It’s only a pot, a plastic bag and some vermiculite. To give it any chance at all, I used hormone rooting powder. This is a story about egregiously bad design. The pot of rooting powder—which was simply on the shelf in the store, it’s not like I did a customer comparison^ or anything—is wider than it is tall, possibly to make the whole show short enough to fit on an average shelf, since it has a dibber^^ built into the cap like a slightly distrait unicorn’s horn. It also has a child-proof cap which is too wide to get your hand around to squeeze. And I have big hands with long fingers. I had to use the sticky-jar opener^^^ to get the frelling thing open. The end of the dibber is also the lid, right? Which means it’s also . . . never mind it’s too wide to get a proper grip on, you don’t need a proper grip to make holes in compost. But because the lid is so frelling vast you’re busy destroying your previous hole, or knocking over your sad confused cutting, while you’re trying to make the next hole. . . .
^ I save that colossal time-suck for things like electric blankets. I think I mentioned that mine died a few days ago. I was hoping the frosty nights were over for the year.
^^ Or dibble. A long pointy thing that makes holes in the ground/compost for you to put seeds or cuttings in.
^^^ I have the vicious-with-teeth variety, none of these wussy rubber rings.
††† Muttering to myself, as I have been doing for seven years now, about getting the frelling shed wired. Which would be dangerous for a lot of reasons, none of them to do with electrocution.^
^ What do you mean it’s midnight and neither I nor the hellhounds have had dinner yet?+
+ Nor written the blog?#
# If hellhounds would like to try, they are welcome.
‡ One genuine, one fraudulent.
‡‡ There have been little faces at the kitchen door increasingly often for the last hour or two. . . .
Spring Sunday with a friend
I’ve been singing. I’ve been singing with Hannah and Peter in the same room. It does happen occasionally that I sing when Peter’s around—especially on Mondays when I have to warm up before I go to my lesson, and can’t afford to get too precious about circumstances—but I do not sing for other people.* I’m not sure if I should be embarrassed or not that it was kind of fun—especially the part with them shouting out suggestions.** I want to say something rude here about neither of them being musical*** but Hannah . . . for pity’s sake, Hannah goes to Broadway musicals. It’s not like she doesn’t know what proper singing voices sound like.† Hannah is a very good friend.
And, more to the point . . . she’s here. I left you last night in a Perils of Pauline situation, with our heroine(s) suspended on the brink of being Lost Forever in Darkest Hampshire. Or possibly not even Hampshire. Outer Mongolia. Aberdeen. Saturn.†† I was just driving back to the cottage in despair††† yesterday when Pooka started barking at me again. I managed not to run off the road—or more to the point did not run into either of the brick-and-flint walls that claustrophobically enclose the single lane of my steep little cul de sac—and further contrived to press ‘answer’ before the call was swallowed up by the entropic maw of the voice-mail system from which none escape unscathed, and . . . it was Hannah. The driver has decided maybe it isn’t the Egg and Custard, she said in Old High Manhattan Laconic, maybe it’s the Toast and Marmite. Or the Daffodil and Schnapps. Or the Militant Stepdaughter . . . More emphatic male quacking in the background. Here, you talk to him, she said.
But where is it, I said. Whatever its name is. There is no Caerphilly Road in Mauncester.
Yes there is, he said promptly. It runs north-south through the Doggleburies.
What? I said. The only road that runs north-south is the Hindu Kush Turnpike.
After a good deal of witty repartee on the order of “You mean Banded Dogglebury or Sod-all Dogglebury?” and “The giant chalk boulder that looks like the anti-matter Darth Vader is in Gerrymandering, it’s not in the Doggleburies at all,” the driver, who by this time I had decided had no business behind the wheel of a car that contained my best friend, capitulated and said, “I’ll meet you at the Ultimate Fishmonger.” “Great,” I said. “I can find the Ultimate Fishmonger, because it exists in this universe.” In fact he didn’t meet me—he dropped Hannah and ran, possibly in some fear of heavy reprisals from a local who knows all the pubs in Mauncester‡ But at least Hannah was there.
. . . And it’s been another beautiful day today and Hannah and I went to a National Gardens Scheme‡‡ garden as the sort of thing one does on a beautiful Sunday afternoon in spring in England, and were swarmed by daffodils and crown imperial fritilleries and alpaca, and suppressed our giggles at the extreme High Tory-ness of the owners‡‡‡ and I bought a plant.§
We also had two gorgeous hurtles with hellhounds over hill and dale and blowing white blossom in the hedgerows and blue, blue sky and general gloriousness and joy and the sap rising in the trees and the human morale . . . and bloody Chaos is celebrating the change of season by not eating.
* * *
* Although I have made a rod for my own back, in that April’s Visitor^ is here over a Monday and I’m taking her with me to my voice lesson.^^
^ I can’t remember what her blog name is, and since my dramatis personae file isn’t in any kind of alphabetical order and it’s gotten rather long over the years I can’t find it. I could always name her again. . . .
^^ She’s the kind of friend who makes it sound like she means it when she says, Yes! I’d love to! But then I specialise in insane friends. Regular readers of this blog may have some idea why.
** Stop laughing. Folk songs. I sing a lot of traditional folk songs. I can do a handful of the obvious ones on request. Supposing I’m singing with you in the room, which is not likely.
*** I can say something rude here about Peter not being musical. Peter is aggressively non-musical, although not, in fact as aggressively non-musical as he likes to pretend. Still. If you are going to take singing lessons and are pathological about singing in front of another human being because you genuinely don’t have much voice but (chiefly) because you are intensely neurotic, Peter is a very good person to be married to. Sometimes fate is kind. It was not on my list of husband requirements twenty years ago that he had to be able to put up with my singing.
† . . . At this point I might, as an opera snob, say something about Broadway musical voices . . . but I’m not going to.
†† Are there pubs on Saturn? Discuss.
††† And wondering how long it would take Wolfgang to start again once I’d turned him off. Since our little erratic fault thingy is continuing. Yes, I should be ringing up the mechanic and having a little discussion about the connection between the starter motor and the thing it starts, but I’ve fallen into the abyssal pit of ‘I’ll do it as soon as I get SHADOWS turned in’. The post-SHADOWS agenda is getting a trifle long. Headed, as it is, by doodles.
‡ By name! Only by name!
‡‡‡ Hannah got nailed as an American, but I escaped by mumbling. An immigrant with no gift for accents quickly develops an instinct for when mumbling is appropriate.
§ Surprise. You’re surprised, right?^
^ I’m waiting impatiently for my new roses. . . . You know, seven years ago when I moved in to the cottage, I’ve told you this, right?, the previous tenant was a terribly proper gardener and the garden was full of terribly proper and high-brow plants. And everyone said, oh, you’re going to rip everything out and plant roses, aren’t you? And I got very huffy and said certainly not, I am only going to pull out the boring things, I like lots of plants that aren’t roses . . . But seven years later I’m aware that pretty much every time anything dies I replace it with roses. . . .+
+ No, it was not a rose I bought today, it was a lychnis. It’s pink though.
The Usual Monday Stuff
I pretty much always come away from my voice lesson exhilarated, because one of Nadia’s tricks is to winkle something good out of SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE to end on (I caught her at it today, so I was thinking about it on the drive home) but sometimes—no, often—this is as frustrating as it is delightful. I WANT TO TAKE THE TEACHER-MAGIC HOME WITH ME SO I CAN USE IT DURING THE WEEK. I’m sure I would get on much faster if it were like pills or something, and at the end of the lesson Nadia would hand me a little bottle and say ‘twice a day, morning and evening, take with food’ or whatever.
I also do know that voice lessons are like every other kind of lesson—or anyway I assume it’s this way with every other kind of lesson: it’s certainly this way with every other kind of lesson-learning I’ve ever done*—that you have to take responsibility back again from your teacher and do it yourself . . . till you can do it yourself. Nadia keeps telling me I need to figure on a six-month lag between the time she starts teaching me something on Monday afternoons and when I’m (more or less reliably) doing it at home by myself. Don’t want to wait six months! Don’t want to!** And I’ve had this little intense rush of improvement lately—well, since I quit my tower.*** Although the foundation of this improvement is that I finally started breathing from my gut, which Nadia says I was due, on the Great Scale of Teacher-Magic, to do anyway, and you really can’t do much of anything till you have the breath to support it. But my own sense of breakthrough is that quitting my tower—getting out of a situation I found very oppressive—gave an extra charge, an extra release, to what’s going on with my singing,† and I think there’s still some momentum from that rolling me forward.
But not fast enough. I missed a couple of days this week due to stomach flu and ME, and yesterday I had to work really hard to make any kind of a noise at all.†† ARRRRRGH. But this morning was not too bad so I went off to Nadia hopefully††† and indeed was rounding up and getting my hocks under me‡ relatively soon—which she commented on.‡‡ Now the thing I’ve been working on this week is keeping the space up at the top end open: asking your brain to tuck itself away‡‡‡ so you can have more empty space for resonance. Nadia’s been telling me about the singer’s smile—that strange smile-shaped rictus that you see on the faces of a lot of classical singers—from the beginning, but getting it connected so that something is going on behind your face has only just started happening recently for me. And I’ve been working on that this week, which is one of the reasons (I think) I opened up faster today when she was running me through my exercises.
So then we started working on Caro mio bien, which has been drawn back out of dusty obscurity again as a learning tool and . . . it all immediately went to hell. ARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH. Well, you know, it’s a song. Exercises are just exercises. Songs are scary.§ There’s stuff going on in a song.§§ So Nadia, pulling her teacher-magic wand out of her sleeve, told me to sing it phrase by phrase—literally. I sang a phrase and stopped. And then sang another phrase and stopped. You don’t have to think about anything except one tiny phrase! she said. Don’t think about anything else! And all you need to do during this tiny phrase is keep your breath going (which will mean that the top end will take care of itself)! Sing it like you believe your breath will be there to support you!
And . . . it worked.§§§ Eventually we put all the tiny phrases together and I sang the whole damn thing through with breath support and an open throat and top end. Yaay. In spite of what the churlish might call backsliding from last week, when things are free and energized like this you can feel the emotional, interpretive stuff poised to come rushing the frell out, whether you actually want it to or not. Eeeek. Scary. But Nadia does keep telling me that if you can set stuff up well enough the rest of it just happens.
Meanwhile . . . another week of practising at home begins. Ah well.
* * *
* Riding lessons spring to mind here
** And if you learn nothing else from this blog, you have learnt that age does not necessarily mean maturity. Tantrums just look sillier, the older you get.^
^ Although singing at my computer WHEN IT’S GETTING ON MY NERVES is . . . surprisingly effective.+ It’s early days yet though, I could still revert. And the first shout of outrage—YOU FRELLBAGGING SODBLASTED GILGALDERAGDAG RAT TURD—usually escapes me. But as I draw breath for the second volley I register what is happening. And start singing. Ee aa eeee aa. Eeee aaaa eeee aa. This may go on for quite a while . . . I’m not sure Peter has been present for one of these occasions yet. He knows about the new system++ so (I assume) he won’t immediately assume I’ve lost my mind+++, but they tend to happen after he’s gone to bed when I often have a bash at the vocal art if I’m too burnt out to keep working and it’s too early to go to bed myself.#
You get really good volume when you’re furious. I’ve always had a cross-country bellow for recalling hellhounds## but trying to shift that, ahem, energy up into head voice is an interesting exercise.
+ Hey—why are you laughing?
++ Feh, he read about it here
+++ Or that Nadia gave me some very strange homework
# Having lost my weekly Sunday morning early-service-ring reset button I’m getting later and later and . . . I may just stay up all day some day, and go to bed the following evening at what the rest of the world considers a sensible hour. I don’t know though. I might come all over strange if I tried to sleep before midnight.
## Fortunately they indulge my little fantasy that I’m in control
*** Sigh.^
^ Although Colin seems to have taken on the burden of keeping me going while I get myself sorted out wherever. Not only, under his tutelage, am I being forced to ring Cambridge on another bell+ he made me call some bob doubles tonight. Arrrrrgh. It takes considerable force of will, harrying learners to do stuff. When you’re a visitor at another tower, the tower captain/ringing master will probably ask you what you want to ring or what you’d like to practise (assuming they have the band to support you) but they won’t assume they know what you ought to be doing for your own good. No, that pleasure is reserved for a ringing master who knows you well.
+ You usually practise a new method on the same bell till you begin to know what you’re doing. Then you can try it on a different bell. It’s the same pattern . . . but you start in a different place in the pattern and all the other bells are obviously in different places relative to you on your new bell than they were on your old bell. It is VERY CONFUSING.
† And this aside from the whole throat-trouble-since-October, several-weeks-of-sore-throat-so-severe-I-couldn’t-sing-at-all. Now, however many weeks later I’m like, throat trouble? I had throat trouble? Really?
†† Except at my computer.
††† Only slightly cursing a beautiful gardening afternoon. There should be another one tomorrow.
‡ Sorry. Dressage joke.
‡‡ ::Beams::
‡‡‡ Why don’t you go to the library for an hour or so, dear?
§ It’s also only just this minute occurred to me that I keep carelessly thinking ‘Caro nome’ rather than ‘Caro mio bien’. Caro frelling nome is that totally killer aria from Verdi’s RIGOLETTO. I couldn’t sing it if my life depended on it^. If I’m getting these mixed up in my head somehow it’s no wonder poor Caro mio bien is scaring me silly.
^ Well, not recognisably anyway
§§ And, because I’m insane, at some level I’m thinking that I’ll hurt its feelings if I sing a song badly.
§§§ Of course it worked. This is Nadia.
Even more singing
While I was working on SHADOWS and not listening to the radio earlier today an interview came on with some Ofsted* bloke about the brand-new report on music in schools in the UK.** Music in schools in the UK is pathetic and getting patheticker*** but what caught my attention is the bloke saying that the official verdict is that even when there is music education offered at all there is too much talking and not enough . . . music.
Sigh.
* * *
When I arrived at Oisin’s this afternoon he was in a high state of boys-with-toys glee, having got the latest add-on to his fancy computer organ programme sorted. Don’t ask me, it’s all way over my head.† He was so happy, and, as I thought, distracted, I thought I might get away with . . . but no. So, what have you brought me, he said.†† Ah, erm, I said. But he goes deploying that old gimlet eye. Drat. He might not have noticed if I’d put the book in my knapsack.††† But there it was, all large and shiny, Benjamin Britten’s Complete Folk Song Arrangements.‡ So. Yeah. I sang. We had a plunge at The Ash Grove and O Waly Waly which is what we’d done last autumn when I was still in a higher degree of squeakery than I am now.‡‡ I then (re)made the mistake of asking if there’s anything he’d like to play, that I might have a quarter of a chance of learning to sing‡‡‡. So, any of you out there sung any of Fauré’s songs? I love Fauré’s vocal stuff, but I suspect it’s harder than it looks.§
I’d gone so far as to photocopy Britten’s Down by the Salley Gardens for my accompanist cough cough cough because I like Britten’s arrangement better than the one in my official music student’s book, which I keep getting the timing of wrong because I’ve got the Britten in my head. So maybe we could try the Britten . . . and then noticed that it has kind of a lot of top As. Oops.
Julia
Just as a thought . . . In my lessons, I was always told to think of it as placement of the voice, rather than reaching for or hitting the note. It’s funny, but using different words actually can change my ability to make the right sound. I know that I have the note, but often when I try to hit it, everything gets tight again, and I can’t do it… or when I do, it sounds wrong anyway.
But if I don’t set myself up with the mindset of “I can hit this note and I’m not getting it and I’m so stupid, I can’t do this aaaugh“, and instead just breathe properly, find the space and let the note happen without stressing about it, the result is a much prettier sound.
Yes. All true. I shouldn’t have said ‘hit’. It’s exactly the sort of eeek/antagonistic attitude that Nadia is trying to winkle me out of. But I fall back way too easily into ‘I’m so stupid I can’t do this aaaaugh’ especially when, for example, I’m on my way to choir practise and I know I’m going to need that A. Stress? Me? Stress? . . . I wouldn’t know not stressing if it bit me. Ow.
Nadia says that whatever your range is everyone stresses about their top notes. Sopranos do it. So do bass-baritones. And part of the irony is that it’s got nothing to do with ‘reaching’ or ‘hitting’—if you want to think in physical terms, the higher the sound the faster the vibration. It doesn’t go up and down, it just goes faster or slower.§§ And something that both Blondel and Nadia have said to me is not to think in terms of reaching up—since I insist on thinking—but of rising above the note and drifting gently down on it. This, when I can stop freaking out long enough, works pretty well for me. It opens up . . . whatever the frell it is that needs opening.
Nadia has also said that I should try just singing—do my warm up exercises away from the piano and check my top notes after I’ve sung them. And when she’s warming me up for my lesson I keep my eyes averted from the piano. She can tell me what I sang later.
Annagail
Different words have different subconsious connotations. New students frequently use the language of “reaching” or “hitting” a note, but voice teachers try to change this way of thinking about singing as quickly as possible, as “reaching” tends to make a note flat (reach up and barely touch the note) and “hitting” tends to make it harsh or come off the body (adding extra unnecessary effort when what is needed is greater release).
Well, this was supposed to be the point of my joke about hitting it: WHAM. Nadia talks about space a lot. Relaxing your throat to let your poor vocal cords/folds vibrate freely, but also using that empty space in your head, you know, resonant sinuses and things, letting the sound carom off . . . well, whatever. Clearly I haven’t quite absorbed this concept yet. But I do know about the singer’s smile—that it’s about lifting and making space—and occasionally I manage to do this. And my mouth opens a little more than it used to—Nadia says that my jaw will drop naturally as I get used to having space, as I learn to like that space. One of the things she’s been talking about recently, since I made my Great Breathing Leap forward a month or something ago, is that the first year of voice lessons is usually the hardest because it really takes that long before you begin to develop a good clear positive feedback loop: breathing deep into your gut feels good and makes a nicer sound, so you do it more, for example. And about jaw-dropping, she says that when I was first coming to her this time last year ‘I couldn’t have got a cigarette paper between your teeth’.
. . . For me, thinking of placement was always a disaster, because “placing” a note gets translated in my overcontrolling little brain as “doing it manually”, i.e. forcing a note to go exactly where I want it to go . . . This way (for me) lies shrillness, offkeyness, and lack of resonance. However, thinking about “placement” for someone . . . without the overcontrolling issue can be a helpful way to get a note (or line, or voice) to focus. . . I had much better results when I thought of a high note as having directionality . . .
Yes. I’m still groping after this—I’m not sure yet what my practical theory of the whole nonsense is—of how to get the best noise out of me. But I’m aware, occasionally, on very good days, of a sort of moving around within the liveness of music and making the contact or connection of sound with a few of its notes. It’s there, you know? And if you’re on form you can kind of chime with bits of it.
Okay. It’s late, and I’ve been working on SHADOWS for kind of a long time. . . .
It depends on what problem the teacher is trying to fix and where the student is coming from. . . . Learning how to get out of the mindset of “omg why can I not do this I was doing this yesterday in my lesson I am so stupid arrgh” is TOUGH. A lot of advanced singers struggle with it . . . Absolutely, allowing yourself to let something happen is by far the best way to do it- the trouble comes (obviously) after you start being hard on yourself. . . .
And finding the line between ‘working hard’ and ‘being hard on yourself’ is, as ever, a ratbag. We didn’t try Britten’s Salley Gardens today but Oisin said, oh, go on, so I’m putting it on the list for next week. I can always take it off again. . . .
* * *
** http://www.ofsted.gov.uk/resources/music-schools-wider-still-and-wider
*** Of course that’s a word. Oisin and I use it all the time when discussing the state of music in British schools.
† Although in this case it was mostly on his hands and knees under the desk/manuals/whatyoucallem. He’s installed a bunch of foot buttons. You know about organs? I didn’t, before Oisin. You can pre-set your registrations, which is which of the terrifying range of stops you have pulled in or out, and attach a different registration to a different single foot or finger button, up to the number of buttons you have. I would have said he has a lot, but apparently not to an organist. He’s going to put in a second row.
†† Ah, the temptation. A partridge in a pear tree? Three calling birds? A dead fish and a handful of empty sweet wrappers? Six and a half stale brownies?^ A cubic zirconia that looks like the Koh-i-noor? My first symphony?
^ Stale? Not bloody likely.
††† Additional reasons for carrying a gigantic knapsack. You can hide your music in it and pretend you didn’t bring it.
‡ Which is looking rather beat up from all the time it spends in my knapsack.
‡‡ Now I can just about be heard over the frelling piano. Did I say this last week? He’s got a GRAND piano in his rather tiny studio. Okay, the studio is larger than a breadbox^ or my kitchen at the cottage, but not a lot bigger, and the grand piano is only a baby, but it’s a medium sized Steinway baby in a very small space and singing to/with it is a bit like being hugged by a large bear. You just hope it’s friendly.
^ Does anyone play Twenty Questions any more? Or know what a breadbox is?
‡‡‡ I’m still a bit stymied by how to make the experience worth his while. He’s a music teacher but he’s not a voice teacher, and he’s a professional accompanist, and it’s not like I’m practising for a recital^ or going for an ABRSM^^ grade test or anything sensible/goal-oriented. So . . . erm . . .
^ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA
^^ HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA +
+ http://www.abrsm.org/en/home
§ Everything is harder than it looks. And one of the things I’m going to ask Nadia this week—I have a little list—is about coping with singing with a someone/something that’s doing something else. I mean, not a choir, where there should be at least a few of you all doing the same thing and providing mutual support etc. How do you just not get hugged to death by your large (friendly) bear? The Ash Grove is one of the (very few) songs that I can sing with something that might almost resemble feeling if you were quick enough to catch it as it flashed by in an instant^ . . . but as soon as there’s a piano I revert to snatching breaths and squalling.^^
^ Which you wouldn’t be, of course, because if you were there, it wouldn’t happen.
^^ I’m still a lot louder than I was six months ago. And there are moments approaching musicality. Just not very many of them.
§§ If I’m getting this wrong, blame me, not Nadia. The stuff I write down in my notebook so I can doublecheck is always right.