Learning to Bluff

 

Way too tired.  Ugh.  Aggravated by this nonsense of having to be out of bed and coherent enough to unlock the door for Atlas at morning-business type hours.  Well, he has his own key, but I would rather protect the poor man from the experience of coming in and finding me slumped on the floor* in my dressing-gown waiting for the kettle to boil.  

            Also I think possibly it is tiring being rumbled . . . in this case by Nadia.  I finally started remembering to bring a notebook** to my voice lessons.  And I've written all kinds of wonderful stuff down . . . which I then get home and can't frelling use.  It's the Teacher-Magic that's missing, you know?  It's like the dry chant of the acolytes without any fresh entrails to read:  it's just not going to work alone.  And about a fortnight ago Nadia suggested that I was writing too much down and probably making my life harder rather than easier.***  Sigh.  Probably.  I still find pretty much everything about singing overwhelming.  Which is why it's a good thing that I sing Flow Gently Sweet Afton and Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes† to the hellhounds when we're out hurtling in a sufficiently remote area:  it reminds me that I like singing, which is how I got into this mess.††  Then I go home and back to the piano and . . . eeep. 

            So last week she said we were going to reduce, as one might a gravy, what I needed to take away with me from the lesson, to a few bullet points.†††  Three, in fact.  And what interests me is that I only really managed to work on one of them.  Speaking of overwhelming—or of being easily overwhelmed.  What interests me even more is that that one is sheer tactics—none of that creepy ephemereal stuff like the actual sound you make—and it's merely this:  sing twice.  Nadia suggested that some of the reason I always sing better for her than I do at home‡ is not only Teacher-Magic but that I've warmed up at home—and the warming up some time before I sing (cough-cough) seriously is in fact something I can reproduce at home.

            This has been amazingly hard to get my head around.  It's like I'm trying to wear my shoes on the wrong feet or something—this is not how I do it—also making time to sing every day (nearly) is hard enough—do it twice?  What is this, self-torture?  Don't I do enough of that naturally?  It's not a time thing per se—I mean it wouldn't have to be—beyond the fact that I'm always always ALWAYS running late so, in the first place, if I manage to get to the piano at all I feel I've gotten away with something and want to stay there for a bit, and in the second place one of the reasons I'm always-always-always running late is because I've got interested in the last five things I've been doing‡‡ and spent too much time at them.  Singing twice merely allows me to overrun twice.  Plus the shoes on the wrong feet feeling.  But if I'm allowing half an hour a day to sing there is no reason I couldn't divide it up into ten minutes and twenty minutes.  Except that's not what happens.

            The second bullet point is to do with vowels.  You don't sing like you talk:  singing is all about vowels with some little brackety things at the ends, which are the consonants.  My vowels need more room.  Trying to give them more room makes me feel silly.  You get over this, says Nadia.  I didn't get very far with it this week—I was too busy wresting myself away from the piano and promising to come back in a few hours—although I did at least remember that it was a bullet point.

            The third one I forgot entirely.  Yes, of course I could have looked it up—what do I have a notebook to write things in for?—but I didn't.  I had enough to do.  So I was fascinated, today, when I went in there and started moaning about not getting it and being overwhelmed . . . to glance down at my notebook and discover that the third bullet point from last week was 'positivity. (strong posture helps)'.

            Oh.

            And one of this week's bullet points?  Bluff. 

            I also went in there saying that if I'm going to sing with the Muddlehamptons I want to contribute, you know?  Which means that the whole teeny weedy squeaky noise thing has got to improve.  You need a singing persona, said Nadia.  Bluff.  You go in there and present yourself as a singer.  And you'll be a singer.

            Oh.

            What this so reminds me of—and Nadia, professional singer that she is, knew exactly what I was talking about—is what I was trying to explain the other night in the blog:  to tell a story you have to get YOURSELF out of the way.  Yes, said Nadia.  You have to learn to get yourself out of the way of your SINGING.

            Oh.

            You think too much, said Nadia.  Write that down.  Don't give yourself time to over-analyse.  Just SING.  Oh, and relax.  And bluff. 

            Oh. . . . 

* * *

* Hey, the nearest chair is the other side of the kitchen from the counter with the electric kettle on it.  A good . . . six feet away.  You expect me to walk that far without caffeine? 

** Did I tell you that it has ROSES on it? 

*** She has a suspicion that I tend toward making my life harder rather than easier.  I don't know where she would have picked up such an outlandish idea. 

† Sad.  Yes, I know. 

†† That, and liking writing songs, which I am going to get back to as soon as PEG II stops reverting to kicking me in the head as default. 

††† Okay, not like a gravy

‡ With one peculiar caveat.  At 2 a.m. or so, too tired to function, well aware that I should be going home to bed, and on the wrong side of a glass or two of wine, is pretty reliably the one time of day (or night) when I can—reliably—get at my top G^ and more and more often the A above it.  The quality of my voice at 2 a.m. and almost too tired to breathe is pretty crap, but the top end is mysteriously available—I mean without any sense of strain.  That'll be the alcohol, says Nadia.  Yes, it is bad for quality sound, but it's a great releaser of inhibition.  Er.  Yes.  I should find a nice folk song that uses the A.  This is when I sing Beethoven's The Miller of Dee, which has the G, and which is great fun.  At the moment I only find the poor A by stirring it with a stick, I mean singing some exercise just to see if it's in residence, which isn't really very friendly.  

^ So the G above the C above middle C 

‡‡ I'm even capable of finding housework interesting.  I like my house(s), you know?  I like my stuff.  The problem is, of course, that housework takes TIME, like every frelling thing else.  Especially when you live in a house full of double-shelved books and little noodgy things.  And hellhound hair factories.