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Bleeeeerg etc
It has not been a good week, barring skylarks. You heard about Monday on Monday. Computer Men said they would return yesterday, bearing Peter’s computer and my printer, but they have decided they are coming tomorrow. They will, I hope, be able to return me to printability* here at the mews, but I have a Friday more Fridayish even than usual tomorrow, and so I will not be available to enable them to dedragon** the cottage desktop of its various little ways, like denying exit from the nuraddin address*** and refusing to open Windows all the way, so an open window scampers around the monitor like someone playing hopscotch. Nor can they investigate why the Walkperson refuses to take both CDs of an opera instead of merely overwriting the first with the second. Hey, it’s the same title, isn’t it? And the ‘disc 2’ probably gets lost after the repetition of the credits, containing as they usually do sixteen sopranos, a counterbassoonist, and the kookaburra for the mad scene at the end of the second act. I want my Gluck.†
Tuesday I bollixed my voice lesson. Whimper. I half knew I was going to; I was way too tired, I’d found two small but sordid inconsistencies in PEGASUS that I had to solve in exactly the same amount of space they were made in—your publisher will probably let you get away with resetting a very occasional line at the page proof stage, but that’s the limit—and the awful truth is that the five-star marketing plan is scaring me.†† So I went in there jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and sang like a person who was jumpy, distracted and underrehearsed, and it was pretty discouraging.†††
Wednesday I went to Ditherington bell practise for our first meeting on the sad new schedule of only second, fourth and fifth-if-any Wednesdays . . . except that it didn’t happen. Niall, Denis and I showed up . . . and spent an hour and a half ringing handbells—Niall never goes anywhere without his handbells—in a freezing cold transept because there was no one else there. I went home, emailed Marilyn and Wild Robert, saying, what happened?, and got a really annoyingly chirpy email back from Marilyn with a copy of the email she had sent all of us about the fact that there was only one Ditherington practise this month. Which Niall and I had both failed to write down.‡ Denis isn’t on Marilyn’s list; his honour remains unimpugned.
And I didn’t have a guest post.‡‡
Today because Colin cancelled and there were no handbells this evening‡‡‡ I decided to give myself a half day off from reading proofs and finish, or semi-finish, or get through draft 2B of, Frost and Fire and Ice to take to Oisin tomorrow: I will probably die of a broken heart if I frumple two music lessons in a row.
I’m a good girl: I hit ‘save’ a lot. I’d been working three hours or so, and was getting pretty tired, but I was also near the end of draft 2B and was feeling reasonably chirpy—ready for a hurtle, a cup of tea, and a return to page proofs. I was pretty sure when Oisin played it back to me tomorrow I’d go, yerp, what was I thinking of, at intervals, but that’s okay. I had something down to work with, and there were actual bits of it I liked. And I’d quite recently hit ‘save’ when I got an error message saying that Windows had a fit of the vapours coming on and was going to close Finale down. Yah boo sucks, I said, as it went KACHUNG off the corner of the piano, but, no big deal, I prodded it with a stick after a minute and woke it up again. And started resignedly putting the last few minutes’ work in again.
And noticed that there was kind of more missing than I was expecting . . .
It had eaten my entire afternoon’s work, despite the fact that I had ‘saved’ about ten minutes before the crash.§
I wasted about fifteen minutes trying to find a ‘contact us’ on the Finale web site that was a ‘contact us’ instead of a come on for lists of dealers and how you can follow them on Twitter and Facebook§§ or join their blog—GAAAAAAAAH—and then I emailed Oisin and a Wise American Friend, both of whom have suggestions for the possibility of ferreting the saved version from the bowels of the beast . . . but I still had to hurtle, read proofs, and write a blog entry, and I’m also a coward. A, furthermore, incompetent coward.
Maybe I’ll try their suggestions now.
Maybe I’ll just go to bed.§§§
* * *
* To the extent that I am ever ungleblarging printable
** Debug is nowhere near powerful enough
*** System Administrator says you’re a bad person and must not be allowed to run at large among the innocent populace
† I want my Gluck Orfeo with my Marilyn Horne and my other Gluck Orfeo with my Janet Baker—if the Walkperson can’t cope with 2 CDs of one opera it’s really going to have palpitations if I expect it to take on more than one recording of the same opera.
I can’t remember now when I watched the much-hyped Met production of Orfeo ed Eurydice on Sky. Recently. I do try to be colour/gender/poundage blind—if someone can sing and act I will avert my attention from the fact that they won’t see forty or a size twelve again, and are playing a tubercular seventeen-year-old. But the k d lang look wasn’t doing our short-Coke-machine-shaped Orfeo any favours, whose acting also had a strong Coke-machine flavour. However I would have encompassed all of this—since she did have a big, thick, rich—one might almost say chocolaty—voice . . . until we got to Che Faro Senza Eurydice^, an aria so familiar that even people who wouldn’t know an opera if it bit them on the leg^^ often recognise^^^, when she kumquatted the ending. What? —Yes, my reaction exactly. WHAT? You mess with Che Faro, I hunt you down and kill you. A Metropolitan Opera mezzo can’t possibly be unable to hit a top F, for pity’s sake??+ So what happened? Goblins in the TV crew?
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=brGYq97Of6w
^^ And often assume it wants to when it’s only trying to, you know, play . . .
^^^ What is that? —Wasn’t it that ad for drain cleaner?
+ Even I have a top F, although no one in their right mind would call my voice thick, rich or chocolaty. I’ve been trying to ignore questions of range because as soon as I’m aware of being above C-above-middle-C I start closing myself down from sheer funk. But Blondel pointed out this week that as soon as I have a reliable G I can sing Dido’s Lament. Oh. Okay. Goal. Goals are good. Meanwhile, speaking of goals and Gluck, I have a new one: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paride_ed_Elena
I am shamefully unfamiliar with all but about four of Gluck’s operas—the fact that he seems to have written almost as many as Handel is a trifle daunting—and I knew nothing about Paride ed Elena till Radio Three played one of Paride’s arias the other day which stopped me dead in my tracks. Want. To. Sing. That. It will be good if I can manage to find the frelling music; it’s not something that rolls to the top of your average search engine.
†† And then there’s stuff like the latest edition of SUNSHINE which I’ll show you as soon as I have a copy in my hot little hand. But due to Screw Ups By Persons Who Shall Remain Nameless^, this is having to be pushed through at the speed of a hellhound after a hellbunny, and I fall over too easily. This evening I got an email from my editor saying, hi, we need this cover text now. I sent it back to her in about an hour. But I’m still shaking like a leaf.
^Neither me, Merrilee, nor the editor in charge, which is all you need to know
††† And it may be just as bad next week, because I’ll only have just turned in the PEGASUS corrections on Monday, and will still be looking around trying to see where I left my life. I did tell Blondel that my so-called life has spells like this. But the week after that I’m planning to be brilliant. Um . . .
‡ We ring too many handbells. Really it’s bad for you.
‡‡ I have mentioned this on the forum, but just so no one gets the wrong idea, NO, even if no one sends me any guest posts between now and the 2nd of November, I am not going to keep printing bits of PEGASUS on Wednesdays and Saturdays.
‡‡‡ So last night was a good thing really.
§ And while this is not in the same category of meltdown, as I was typing that sentence, my email pinged. And when I went a few minutes later to look and see if anything cool was coming in^ I discovered that someone I have already put on my ‘blocked senders’ list has frelling come through again, as he/she has done several times already. What the bleeding (*&^%$£”!!!!!!
^ The Tyranny of the Ping
§§ Bite me
§§§ And furthermore Philip Langridge died. He actually died last Friday, but I didn’t hear about it till Monday and only caught up with the obituary yesterday.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2010/mar/07/philip-langridge-obituary
He was, speaking of acting singers, an actor. Last time I saw him he was scaring you silly as the witch [sic] in Hansel and Gretel: an opera I’ve never had much use for, partly because it’s usually played for a high smarm level. Not this one. More Bluebeard’s Castle than Goldilocks. I have him on CD singing Britten’s Peter Grimes and the weak, venal captain in Billy Budd . . . both of which are so brilliantly evoked I find them hard to listen to: I like the occasional speck of dawn in my unrelenting darkness. I love Britten, but he was maybe a little too good at the snake pit that is humanity.
I never met Langridge, nor know anything about him but what I heard in a few interviews, but I feel like I’ve lost a friend.
Ice This
Okay, what is this?
I mean, I know what it is. It’s ice. It’s a very strange ice self-sculpture as discovered in my rain gauge this morning. I’ve been trying to remember if there’s been any weird ice effects before this; we’ve been having hard frosts pretty much every night for a week or so I think—certainly last night and the night before. And we’ve had lots of hard frosts all winter long.
But yesterday was positively warm, so anything that might have happened the night before that would have melted. I also did some gardening yesterday and I’m pretty sure I would have noticed gnomish* water. But is there some inscrutable Memory of Water going on here?
All the ice crystals held hands/tentacles/tendrils/teenyweeny subatomic appendages when they melted yesterday and last night as they hardened up again since they were all friends now they started building a cheerleader pyramid? 
I haven’t dumped the rain gauge out since falling lake over the weekend—maybe it has something to do with the drastic slope of the gauge? Beats the heck out of me. Maybe I’ll send it to the New Scientist and ask them. They like stuff like this.
And it was a nightmare to photograph. I must have taken two dozen photos** and they’re all out of focus.*** These are merely less out of focus than the others. My camera has these little orange squares that tell you what it’s going to focus on . . . wrong. It can’t stand shiny translucent ice, so it just ducks around the orange squares and finds a nice daphne or plant pot or dead thing to focus on.
I emailed Blondel last night and said that I’d lost about half of this week to ME, that I’d just tried singing for the first time since about Thursday and . . . oh dear. That I still wanted to come for my lesson† but not to expect much. He emailed back that he was sure we could ‘make good use of the time’†† if I was feeling up to it.
Right at the moment about ninety percent of what I learn about singing every week happens in that single hour in Blondel’s tiny spare-bedroom studio. The ten percent is just me at home picking out the melody on the piano with one finger, or urgently re-re-listening to selected youtube tracks.††† I am hoping that eventually I can do some of that what-needs-supporting, where-it’s-tight stuff for myself, but at the moment all I ever seem to do at home—aside from trying to learn the frelling tune‡—is recognise that the noise I’m making is more good or less good‡‡ and beyond that it’s all unfathomable . . . squeaking.‡‡‡
Sigh.
I had forgotten more than I had learnt since last lesson § but at the end Blondel still said, I’ll have a new song for you next week. Your coloratura is really very good,§§ I’ll look for something else with coloratura in it.
Squeak.
* * *
* Gnomish: to do with gnomes. Yes, I want to say gnomic but that’s about aphorisms. Hmm. Aphoristic water. Woo ooh.
** I looove my digital camera. It took a little while. I was last on the block. I might still be last on the block without a digital camera except that Peter bought me one because he thought I was being silly about them. Silly? Me?
Now who’s going to fix my attitude toward my little videocam? Yup. I have one. Poor thing. It sure has stamina. It’s been buried in a heap of early draft manuscripts for months. I finally fished it out about a week ago and gave it a charge, expecting it to tell me that it had eaten itself and all its software, the way rechargeables do if they aren’t. Nope. Still working. So then I put it on its bendy feet, pointed it at the piano, and sang the lullaby from PEGASUS in front of it.
BIG MISTAKE.
The bottom of a pile of early draft manuscript isn’t nearly far enough away. Not in the same county.
*** And sometimes I don’t love my digital camera quite so much.
† Have I told you that my fourteen-year-old car passed his road inspection first go? That they couldn’t even find anything wrong? Evidently there hadn’t been a hard frost recently when they went to unlock the doors.
†† Good use of the time. Sigh. I might as well be ringing Cambridge and singing and composing the second parts of lullabies^ for all the forward I’m getting on PEG II. I’m getting tired of that blank screen. This happens to me; in itself it’s not a big deal; after the fairies^^^ finish moving the furniture around they’ll let me back in the house again. Meanwhile . . . well, if I miss getting it turned in on time, you’ll just have to wonder/put off reading PEG I^^^^ a little longer.
^ Did I tell you Peter wrote me a second verse? With variants. In case I want the stress on a different part of a line, he said. Golly. We’re collaborating more on this than we ever have for ELEMENTALS.
^^ Maybe I should take up knitting.
^^^ Or possibly gnomes
^^^^ Which of course you’ve already bought
††† Now that I’m beginning to learn it a little, Alfred Deller’s performance of Purcell’s Evening Hymn is much. Too. Slow.
‡ And all those horrible where-you-come-ins
‡‡ Or possibly more bad or less bad
‡‡‡ I have the video to prove it
§ SIGH
§§ Remember that this is teacherspeak and relative. It’s true that given the general level of direness my coloratura is better than you’d expect.
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.
How do I . . .
. . . get myself into these things.* Or at least if I have to get into things, couldn’t I get into ones that aren’t going to cause other aspects of my personality to stab me repeatedly with sharp pointed panic? I really should have taken up knitting.** Nobody watches you while you knit.***
I told you that Blondel gave me Purcell’s Evening Hymn for next week. He played and sang it through for me before I took it away and while I was entirely riveted by the eighty-seven bar one-breath Hallelujahs, the time signature itself didn’t impress itself upon me as being too bizarre or anything.† Because I am lazy and irresponsible and doing twenty-seven other things on Wednesday, I didn’t get the hymn out to look at by myself till yesterday. And discovered the freller is in 3/2. Not 3/4 or 6/8 or 3/8 or 2/4 or anything remotely normal. Three two? How the bleeding dranglefab do I count 3/2?††
So I spent a little while confusing myself badly and then thought I’ll take it to Oisin. Which was very sensible of me. Unfortunately I didn’t stop there. I have no idea how I got from this sensible decision to the manifestly lunatic one of bringing my Finzi along too and asking if Oisin can play It Was a Lover and His Lass. I mean, of course he can. He’s an accompanist. It’s one of the things he does. His first love is playing the organ, but he also runs a choir, teaches piano and half a dozen other instruments†††, plays duets and . . . accompanies people. Including singers. So, why would I want him to play It Was? Please remember that I’m the person who was about to indulge in a nervous collapse Tuesday afternoon when it looked like Blondel and I were on our way to the cathedral’s practise room, because it might not be soundproof enough. Or someone might come in while we were there. Yesterday my 3/2-addled brain was groping along some path of non-thought to do with the fact that Blondel struggles with the piano for It Was—he doesn’t struggle nearly as much as I do with the singing, but he’s not having a totally good time—and . . . uh. . . . This is where the breakdown in logic occurred.
I’m pretty sure I told you I’d asked Oisin . . . quite a while ago now, if he’d play for me to sing to some time and he agreed much too readily. I wasn’t planning on getting to this point however for . . . oh, years yet. Years and years.‡ But I think I’ve painted myself into the corner. I think I have to come to my next . . . er . . . music lesson with Oisin prepared to sing.‡‡ Hey, we could have a crack at Fear No More while we’re at it. AAAAAAAUGH.‡‡‡
Meanwhile I think the lullaby from PEGASUS is more or less finished. My printer is giving me gyp but I need to get it printed out since scrolling down and across your computer screen while you’re trying to play the piano is not ideal and even Oisin is slightly confounded. I want to test out the playability of the accompaniment (!) on me before I release it to a semi-waiting world. Maybe next Friday.
* * *
* No dabble setting is how. I’ve told you this story, haven’t I? Except I can no longer remember if it was Hannah or Merrilee who first came up with the ‘no dabble setting’ as the explanation of my personality. I do remember that whoever it was promptly told the other one and Peter and they’ve all been quoting it at each other and laughing like drains for fifteen years or so. VERY FRELLING FUNNY. HA HA HA. So what’s wrong with being enthusiastic about the stuff you do? Maybe slightly too much stuff? Maybe slightly too enthusiastic? It’s the sign of a lively and wide-reaching intelligence that you have bookshelves on all your walls^, subscribe to 1,000,000,000 magazines and journals on 1,000,000 topics, and never get to bed till at least mmmph o’clock in the morning because you can’t tear yourself away from one or twelve of them any sooner. This last possibly exacerbated by your having been out pursuing one (or twelve) of them earlier in the day.
I suppose deliberately gaining possession of two puppies who could be expected to grow up to require two hours of hurtling a day—when you live in town—might also be the result of a dabble-free personality. Three and a half years ago I didn’t know just how bad the menopause/calorie situation was going to become. I’m glad I didn’t decide on goldfish. Although dabble-free goldfish would probably require excessive struggling with large heavy aquaria etc. But I imagine hurtling is a more efficient calorie-burner.
^ I’ve even managed to put together an entire shelf of books on change ringing. This takes some effort. There aren’t a lot of bell ringing writers.+
+ Yes. Hmmm. THE BELLS OF MAZAHAN is probably after ALBION which is probably after PEG II. But don’t count on it.
** Note past tense. It’s too late. Yes it is. Although I got another Ehrman’s catalogue a few days ago. Remember Ehrman? http://www.ehrmantapestry.com/ Sigh.
*** Or if they do you can tell them to stop because they’re being weird.
† Actually I did notice on Tuesday as I was watching over Blondel’s shoulder that while the notes themselves looked all right there seemed to be kind of funny collections of them between bar lines. But I was busy being riveted by the hallelujahs, and I tend to go into a trance when Blondel sings anyway.
†† I keep telling you I’m not musical. I just like the noise. And I like clubbing myself senseless with unsuitable challenges.
††† If he ever replaces his flute, I’m first in line to nail the old one. For my copious free time.
‡ So, I was wrong. Enthusiasm is bad for you.
‡‡ The rest of the day I’ve been hallucinating with bitter and harrowing vividness that moment some months ago when I had to come in for the first time on a note all by myself in He Was Despised while the piano—and the pianist—just sat there. It’s going to be like that but worse.
‡‡‡ Maybe I keep doing stuff like this to myself because it makes such good blog material? But the thing is . . . I really enjoy messing with music. I love playing the piano. I love composing. I even . . . well . . . I even love singing. Somehow or other I have got to get over this crippling sick-making stage fright nonsense. I’m not asking to be Marilyn Horne or Maddy Prior^. Or Angela Hewitt.^^ I’m just trying to have some fun. I do this for FUN.
You are used to really bad singers, aren’t you? I said skittishly to Oisin. Oh, absolutely, he said, way too cheerily.
^ Or Bernarda Fink, whose album of Schubert lieder I’m listening to as I write. Mmmmmm.
^^ Or Hildegard of Bingen. Or Amy Beach.
Singing, Handbells, and Undesirable Lateness
How did it get this late? Arrgh. This is why I try to have only ONE extracurricular per day—Fridays, with piano lesson and home tower practise, remind me every week what a good idea this is. But somehow or other I got roped into handbells tonight*—the lure of bob major is very strong**—and about once a month Niall has a handbell party for some of his fancy ringers and the only way I ever am going to ring bob major, which is eight bells, is if I come along to Niall’s Tuesdays. Unless Niall and Colin and I kidnap someone and keep them chained up in the cellar*** with only books of handbell patterns for company.†
But first there was the voice lesson. Whose stupid idea was voice lessons anyway.†† Gods, I so don’t NEED something else to be obsessive about.††† Did I tell you last week that Blondel sent me home to learn It Was a Lover and His Lass from (Gerald) Finzi’s Let Us Garlands Bring, which is where Fear No More (the Heat o’ the Sun) comes from, which was the last thing I learnt‡ before my inadvertent very long holiday?
There are at least two problems here. No, three. One: Enthusiasm. Enthusiasm is deadly. It gets you into all kinds of trouble.‡‡ It means I make eager little rushes at all kinds of inappropriate things: ooooh, I like that! Let me try! Two: I think Blondel has either forgotten, or, more likely, never known, how frelling DIFFICULT singing is, and while he is a good and patient and encouraging teacher, if he is confronted by a student saying, ooooh, I like that! Let me try!, he probably will. And third, my lessons tend to run long anyway, so we suddenly notice the time and think, yeep, okay, quick, what are we going to do next week? He could of course make me work harder and longer on individual pieces . . . but I’m actually glad he doesn’t; at my level of non-skill this would quickly become demoralising. He does say things like this song needs more mischief, or more passion, or more something, but I haven’t got mischief or passion I can produce vocally, so better I should do what I can and keep moving—keep being enthusiastic. And I am making progress. I noticed it particularly today, I think because it’s been almost like starting over from the beginning after so long a break . . . except it isn’t. I sound a whole lot more like a singer than I did in August.‡‡‡
Anyway. We got rather past the end of our time last week and . . . quick, what was I going to work on for this week? I’d meant to have a go at It Was a Lover over the break, and didn’t, frelling deadlines and novels and things having got in the way, so Blondel said fine, you can look at that this week.
So I did.
And I thought Fear No More was hard. Well, it is. It Was a Lover is worse. The gods frelling wept. The only thing that saved me from utter humiliation is that I’ve got Bryn Terfel singing Let Garlands Bring§ and I have played It Was over and over and over and over and over and over and over and . . . quite a few more times this week. The wretched song changes key and key signature with mad abandon and the singer keeps coming in just after you think you should, and while Bryn makes it all sound easy as tripping over your own feet§§ IT IS NOT.
I did not, in fact, make an ignominiously inglorious hash of it. It was recognisable. This counts. And Blondel had one or two muttered asides about the accompaniment.§§§ And I am going to work on it some more this week. But when we got to the end this week# he acknowledged that Lover was, in fact, difficult, and maybe I should have something easy to spell myself with this week so I wouldn’t become despondent and decide to take up curling or morris dancing or knitting or something. And he picked a book up off the side of his piano because in fact he does think ahead sometimes but see (2) in the ‘problems’ listed above. He’s given me a Purcell song. So far, so English, so excellent.## It’s called An Evening Hymn. Any of you out there who know it should start falling off your chairs laughing at this point, at the idea that this is supposed to be easy. Well, you don’t have any extremely weird comings-in in weird places in the bar, no###. What you have instead is a lot of the Purcell Twiddles. You know, twiddletwiddletwiddletwiddledeedeedee on the same syllable, bar after bar after frelling bar. This will be very good for your breathing, says Blondel. Gfffghfffzzzzgft!!! Also, ARRRGH!
. . . I’m going to have to pack this entry in despite everything I haven’t told you about yet~; the kitchen lighting at the mews has always been possessed by demons and the light immediately over the kitchen table where my laptop and I sit communing keeps dying off and then coming back on again a second or several seconds later with a kind of rush like someone nodding off during a lecture or a concert and trying to pretend they aren’t. Peter rang the electrician yesterday who was kind enough to stop by on his way home after work today . . . and of course the miserable thing stayed on perfectly. It was flashing like bloody Morse code~~ at lunch and again now and my eyes are rebelling. And I’ve Fiona coming again tomorrow to organise me and it would probably be a good thing if I were not only up and dressed and caffeinated but had possibly even swept the flooooor. . . .
* * *
* I only just started voice lessons on Tuesdays again last week after something awful like two months
** I am crazy
*** I don’t think any of us has a cellar
† And lots of chocolate. It wouldn’t be a bad life, you know, being our handbell slave.
†† A common shriek in this household, with minor variations: Whose idea was hellhounds! Whose idea was handbells! Whose idea was a third house with a weight bearing attic floor for storing backlist!
††† Especially with this voice.
‡ make that ‘learnt’
‡‡ Hellhounds. Handbells. VOICE LESSONS.
‡‡‡ If I went on making progress at this rate I would be opening at the Met just before I died of old age. I suspect however that a final plateau of physical possibility will be reached rather sooner.
§ I’ve posted this before, haven’t I? The Vagabond & other songs by Vaughan Williams, Butterworth, Finzi, Ireland; DG, 1995. One of my favourite albums. And I want the coat he’s wearing on the cover. I think I’ve also said that it’s actually easier listening to a baritone to die for than a mezzo to die for. I don’t expect to sound like a baritone when I open my own mouth, and the ‘to die for’ shock is therefore somewhat tempered.
§§ Or a hellhound
§§§ Hee hee hee. There’s nothing like watching a teacher struggle for cheering up a student. Never mind that I’m thirty years older than he is. He’s still the boss.
# Because it is late and I am brain-fried and chronology is never my best trick anyway, I have neglected to tell you about arriving for my lesson in the pouring rain and discovering Blondel standing in it, staring at his car and looking dismayed. I’ve lost my visitor’s permit, he said, rain trickling down his forehead. He lives in one of these overcrowded Park Here And Die areas, and visitors have to display large flashy visitors’ permits on their dashboards or expect to find a small blot on the pavement when they come looking for their illegally parked car. He had used his permit on his rental car while his own was in the shop, and somewhere between the garage and home the permit had disappeared. After we had both stood around in the rain for a few minutes he devised the impromptu plan of going to the cathedral and using their practise room which, he said, midafternoon on a Tuesday, would probably be empty. I was in the process of (a) following him the mysterious back way to the cathedral (we’re turning right here??) and (b) working myself up into a state of extreme panic at the idea that the room might not be absolutely one hundred per cent soundproof OR that we would not be allowed to have a PADLOCK on the door and someone might COME IN while we were there when . . . he pulled over, got out of his car, ran back to my car (it’s still pouring with rain, by the way), and said, I’ve remembered what I did with the permit.
So we turned around and went back. Whew. Except for the part where he said, you know, we should book to go to the cathedral some time. It would be good to practise somewhere different occasionally.
Eeep. And here I was almost used to the idea that he has neighbours.
## I’m not going to be let off German forever. Just for now.
### Although I notice the singer has to come in alone occasionally, my favourite thing in the world as we know
~ Like ringing the trebles to bob major on handbells, which I’ve not done before. On the rare occasions I’ve rung major at all, I’ve clung to the seven-eight which are the easiest pair. The trebles in a plain course are the hardest, but I’m only half-crazy really, and the trebles suddenly become the easiest as soon as people start calling touches.
~~ Help help I’m being kept prisoner in a cellar and being made to ring handbells. No, on second thought, ring the boss and say I quit. It’s not a bad life being a handbell slave and there’s plenty of chocolate.
