Singing and ghostbusting

 

I'm just back from seeing GHOSTBUSTERS.  No, really.  Special Halloween screening.  Penelope brought it up while we were de-[cob]webbing the tower on Friday night.*   She pays attention to these things.**  I of course do not.  Although this means that I'll have been inside that cinema—any cinema—three times in eight days, which does not happen.***

            Anyway.  I'm glad to report it's still funny.  Although how a cellist in an orchestra is paying for a corner penthouse flat overlooking Central Park is a little beyond me but never mind.†  I love all the bullfeathers science twaddle Ackroyd and Ramis are always spouting in this intense boy-geek way.  I love what a sleazeball Murray is—that character that he patented.  Of course I love the Staypuft Marshmallow Man.  But I particularly love Sigourney Weaver's legs.  When Penelope mentioned going I remembered the song, the Ghostbusters hearse, Annie Potts as the secretary, Listen do you smell something?, and He slimed me! . . . but chiefly I remembered Sigourney Weaver's legs, when the Gatekeeper and the Keymaster have been getting it on on the roof and she draws herself together and steps down off her balustrade like an empress descending from her throne.††

            I was also worried that it would have dated badly:  when you're watching something from the 1920s it's what it is, and the style and mannerisms—and the haircuts—are part of the picture and not distracting.  I was afraid the 1980s were going to be at that awkward stage where everything (especially the haircuts) are still recent enough to be cringe-makingly embarrassing.  But I just thought it was huge ridiculous fun and no harm in being of its time.††† 

* * *

Meanwhile . . . Monday is voice lesson day.  Um.  EMoon has been writing about her voice lessons . . . 

. . . it's been strongly hinted that I should be preparing a chunk of the Verdi Requiem (eep!) 

I would kill to sing in Verdi's Requiem—to be able to hold my end up in a performance worth performing.  

and also–last week's decision–should consider tackling Schumann's song cycle about a woman's life. In German. Do I speak German? No. 

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frauenliebe_und_-leben  You're singing this?  Whimper.  Whimper.  I think I'll stop this singing nonsense and . . .  take up knitting . . . no, wait, I can't use that line any more.  But the Frauenliebe-something?  I know someone who is singing that?  That's like . . . the lieder version of singing Violetta in La Trav or Rosina in the Barber.  Whimper.

At home and in the car I cannot sing half as well as in lessons, 

Me too.  But I'm now also screwing myself up in lessons by knowing I have something to lose—I get tense about whether I am going to sing well enough for Nadia—which is all about me and nothing about her—whereupon I sing less well.  

but I'm singing (a little) better. I simply cannot hear the nuances that Svengali hears, and thus don't self-correct. . . . 

Yes.  This is part of the frustration of the winding myself up I reflexively and irresistibly do—Nadia can get better noises out of me even when I'm tensed up than I can do at home when I'm (comparatively) relaxed.  KNITTING.  KNITTING IS MY FUTURE.  I suppose when I move on to cardigans I'll decide that that's performance too, and . . . 

The exercise of looking at myself in the mirror while I sing vowel exercises is…hideous torture. . . . 

Thank the gods Nadia does not ask this.  Either I'm not at a point where it would be useful . . . or she knows I would run away to Brazil.  I could take up the samba.  At home.  Alone.  With no mirrors.  I might hum a little while I trip over invisible obstacles on the perfectly flat floor.

 . . . . Svengali said what else did I have in my folder? There's that Vivaldi, that "Qui sedes…" thing from the Gloria, I said. Perfect, he said. But I haven't, um, learned it, I said. Well, just read it, he said. My heart sank all the way to the basement and we were on the third floor. He flipped open his copy and . . .  commenced to play the piano part, leaving me to figure out where to come in. Both temporally and altitudinally. . . ."It's VIVALDI! It's got lots of NOTES! Fast notes! High notes! Accidentals! You can't read that. . . !" But there was Svengali, playing away, apparently certain that I could, and would. And the musical part of my mind, that has actually been singing in this choir for 7 years now, though very much NOT solo, was noting "2 sharps, 3/8 time, not TOO high…"

…panic and euphoria fought for dominance (panic won every time Vivaldi did something interesting with the tempo; euphoria when I correctly read–to my own astonishment–a bunch of sixteenth notes bobbing up and down and around with what I used to call "twiddly bits." . . . )

Here's what it should sound like.  . . . 

. . . Siiiiiiiiiiiigh.  On second thought, maybe I shouldn't bother telling you about my voice lesson.   I'm still having Throat Crud problems, but Nadia pointed out that we're also going through change-of-season weather and along with making the ME flare it's probably making my voice . . . uh, de-flare, as it were.  So, soldiering on.  I told you last week she'd said I could retire Non lo diro col labbro but I should keep bringing in Caro mio ben, and she gave me another song out of the book Non lo is in—which is an Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music anthology for people who are trying to go for grade level marks.  It's a folk song that almost sounds like lots of other folk songs, but not quite, and it's wonderfully pretty and comparatively easy‡ in that slightly misleading way of a good folk song, called She's like the swallow, and it's about a girl who apparently dies of love despite the fact that the bloke singing the song was apparently her lover and loved her.  Backstory.  I want the backstory.   But.  Whatever.  I was actually more or less singing it today, although I've only had it a week—and I sang Caro with something almost approaching, you know, feeling.  Even when I have enough of a clue about maintaining the frelling melody to have some brain-space to think about dynamics and line and all that miserable stuff, I don't know how to think about it.  It's a language I don't yet . . . sing.

            Today's Nadia-magic was first a tongue-relaxing and jaw-loosening exercise . . . how do the Nadias and the Svengalis know these things?  It doesn't seem to me enough to say that they're trained musicians and voice coaches;  it's like saying, oh, Sigourney Weaver was floating four feet above her bed because she was taught how.  And then Nadia made me sing leaning—lightly, but leaning—against the door.  And my voice just frelling opened.‡‡  Nobody's going to ask me to sing Schumann any time soon‡‡‡ but . . . um . . . anything is (ultimately) possible with magic.

* * *

* First check.  Some godlike being or other decreed that some kind of pre-pre-pre-preparative rumbustiousness, which had not previously been budgeted for in either time or money, had to go on in the belfry.  So all the ropes came off and the initiates with their hard hats and their blow torches and alembics or what have you climbed up and occupied our bell tower this past week.  They were going to be out on Thursday, so Vicky and Roger could put the ropes back on and we could have practise on Friday. 

            They were not out on Thursday.

            They were not out on Friday.  Thereupon Vicky in her turn as demigodlike being decreed that we were going to have a major clean-up because the operatives had made an awful mess with their crucibles and mortars and pestles and things.  And then the tower hoover blew out the electricity^, and . . .

            Penelope's voice from the torch-beam-spangled darkness said, Do you fancy going to see GHOSTBUSTERS on Halloween night?

            GHOSTBUSTERS? I said.  Golly.  —I'd moved back to Maine by then, but I was spending as much of my time in Manhattan as Down East in the '80s and I'd seen it several times within the first few years after it came out but haven't seen it again since. 

            Postscript:   The toilers and labourers were not out on Saturday either, which meant we did not ring service on Sunday morning and we're all cranky.    

^ On account of after-dark hellhounds I carry not one but two pocket torches as standard equipment. 

** She's also one of the movers and shakers in the local film society, which specialises in small independent films in languages no one has ever heard of and therefore there are no subtitles, concerning things like yaks and nuclear fission.  It's a bit of a relief to know she's capable of slumming. 

*** For DON GIOVANNI, GHOSTBUSTERS, and SIEGFRIED.  ::whiplash:: 

† The one thing that did bother me is the scene where Bill Murray finds Sigourney Weaver possessed by the fell spirit of the Gatekeeper.  At the end of it Dan Ackroyd phones him and says, We have a situation, you have to come now . . . and Murray says oh, okay, that's fine, I've filled her up with Thorazine, and he leaves.  Thorafrellingzine?  And, note, she's not only unconscious, she's panting, which is a sign of, you know, stress.  Okay, okay, this is not merely 'only a film' which doesn't always cover it for me^ but only a silly film and in terms of irresponsible modelling there aren't going to be too many situations in the real world where you're going to have to deal with demonic possession.  But thorazine?  It's an antipsychotic, for pity's sake, and we all know she's not psychotic, she really is possessed.   And what's he doing carrying thorazine around in his frelling pocket anyway?  He's got a PhD in psychology, don't you have to be a doctor of medicine to get your hands on antipsychotics?  And how much of an antipsychotic^^ does it take to knock someone out cold?  AND SHE'S PANTING.

            It's true, I'm old, and I have (almost) no sense of humour. 

^ The running little old ladies and small cars off the road because you're driving at 200 mph to save the world doesn't work for me. 

^^ Okay, it's also good for reducing anxiety.  But there seems to me a credibility gap between 'calm' and 'unconscious'.  

†† At 6 foot, there's a lot of legs going on.  Although speaking of legs, and while I'm complaining, something that bothers me every time I see this movie is the way the demon dogs run.  This has nothing to do with what you could create with your digital design toys thirty years ago and what you can do with them now—this is someone not bothering to look at how things with four legs run, demonic or otherwise.      

††† Penelope agreed, but then she's almost as old as I am and remembers those haircuts. 

‡ And, let us not overlook, in English.  

‡‡ . . . Sympathetic magic?  Doors . . . er . . . open? 

‡‡‡ And the truth is I'm planning to skip German altogether, so that's okay.  I'm also not sure if the gruesome political incorrectness of the Frauein cycle would rub me worse or wear off into inconsequentiality if I were working on it.  Keep us posted.