Voice lesson

 

Mondays are good days. 

Although it's been rather a frustrating week on the singing front, but then what week isn't, since I go on waking up every morning and finding that my voice has not become a clone of Cecilia Bartoli's.*  The present exasperations include (a) that I seem to have hit the wall with Caro Mio Ben** and (b) that it's taking me so long to sing myself 'in' lately, so that I can start doing something, that I zone out and then it takes even longer and is even more boring.  So today we started with a little chat about my unreal expectations.***  You do set the bar rather high for yourself, said Nadia, and added that Caro Mio Ben is not a beginner's song.†  Feh.  I was thinking about this on the drive home however and a further aspect to my problem is that I like the ones that aren't beginner's songs.  I really, really like She's like the swallow †† for example and am happy to sing it, but I also have a slight case of okay, fine, where's a scary one?  I'm bad at physical heights, but bring on the metaphoric ones, you know?  I admit I'd feel a little better about my foolhardiness if I didn't suspect it's also a way to FAIL myself.

So first Nadia taught me a couple of more amusing singing-in exercises which she then had to write out for me because I'd never remember them long enough to go home and write them out for myself.  And while she was doing this she asked me to explain what I meant about hitting the wall with Caro.  Um, I said.†††  I can't make it do anything. ‡ 

. . . At first I thought it was just I didn't know the melody well enough yet.  But I know the dranglefabbing melody backwards ‡‡ by now and I still . . . just plod it.  I suppose I'm talking about dynamics, but what it feels like is that I can't connect with singing it—it's so gloriously mournful, but when I sing it it's just one note after the other.  You don't necessarily have to have a good voice to sing feelingly.

This is where the teacher-magic comes in, and I can't explain what she did—and gods frell it anyway, I won't be able to reproduce it at home either.‡‡‡  And there was nothing Cecelia Bartoli about it.  But I was beginning to sound like I was singing the odd phrase here and there with some emotional resonance.  Your emotions are okay, said Nadia.  Use them.  Ha frelling ha.  However. . . .

What we didn't get to is that (because I have a short attention span and am easily baffled) I'd gone back to The Roadside Fire this week—hey, it's in English—for something else to sing, and discovered, rather thrillingly, that I'm singing it differently—differently in a good way, I hope, which I need Nadia to pass judgement on, in her tactful teachery way.  I also asked her if I could please have something else in Italian to go on mumbling and failing to engage with§ which she said she'd think about this week.  Meanwhile I'll have to go on singing Roadside §§ and losing faith in what I thought was happening, and, knowing me, since I have neither been bodily prevented §§§ nor deflected onto a more suitable piece, playing amateur luge with Se Tu M'Ami.

Nadia also said that while when we first spoke on the phone most of a year ago and I had told her that Blondel gave hour-long lessons and she said no, no, she only ever did forty-five minutes, that she was reconsidering this in my case because I seem to like to bite off rather large mouthfuls at home and tend to come in with more music than we can get through in forty-five minutes. #  So if I feel like spending the extra money ## we can talk about scheduling for an hour.

I'm going to take this as a compliment.

 * * *

* Nadia is such a hoot.  Have I told you this?  I said this to her once and she said promptly, we already have a Cecilia Bartoli.  We don't need another one.  You want to find your voice.  —Well, yes, I do, but that's only because Cecilia Bartoli's is not on offer.  Or Marilyn Horne's, or  Janet Baker's, or Bryn Terfel's. 

** Which Bartoli sings divinely, which, as Nadia points out, is also part of my problem.^ 

^ I'm pretty sure I've posted this before:    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-Hlk8EDA02M   I also want the dress.  

*** See previous footnotes. 

† The thing is . . . I do know I'm not Cecilia Bartoli.  I haven't wasted my life because I never was going to set the world alight from the opera stage.  It's not a problem.  But there's some kind of disconnect between that comforting thought . . . and what the hell I still think I ought to be able to flog out of myself.  Sigh.  

†† jjmcgaffey wrote:

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.

How many verses are you singing? I Googled it, and found from four to eight – and the eight-verse one has a complete story.

http://www.songlyrics.com/blackburn-fiona/she-s-like-the-swa llow-lyrics/

She's pregnant, and he says he loves all women, not just her. Then she lies down and dies – makes a lot more sense than the 4-verse version. 

Duh.  Never thought to Google.  Thanks.  An awful lot of folk/traditional songs have cross-fertilised to such an extent it's impossible to know which bits belong where and which have migrated in.  To a great extent it doesn't matter—if it works, use it.  You're right that this makes sense of the story, but some of those middle verses require new music, because they don't fit with the rest—and the 'when I wore my apron low he was all over me and now I wear my apron high he sprints past like the devil or a father with a shotgun is after him' shows up in so many songs.  I haven't heard this version so maybe it works in performance. 

††† I'm so good with words. 

‡ See previous footnote. 

‡‡ Which is not necessarily a good thing.  Generally speaking you want to know a tune frontwards. 

‡‡‡ When I tell her this next week she will remind me that her rule of thumb is that there's a good six months' lag in what she's teaching me and what I can begin to do at home for myself. 

§ Or I'll go back to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=THTUCtExVbo which has 'demoralise Robin' written all over it.  It's just it's lots of fun to sing till you hit the wall.

§§ Speaking of Bryn Terfel.  And Jean Ritchie. 

§§§ She could tear the pages out of the book, I suppose.   But I'd cry.

# What she kindly did not say is that it's not just the music, it's the amount of time she spends talking me out of the holes I've dug for myself. 

## And I have a birthday a little over a week away. . . . maybe Peter hasn't already filled his quota??