Ringing, singing and remembering

 

It's Remembrance Weekend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Remembrance_Day which tends to mean extra ringing.*  But it means extra ringing with the clappers half-muffled** which is surprisingly disconcerting to the less-than-fabulous ringer.  Half-muffled means that the handstroke bongs out as usual, but the backstroke has leather, rubber or padded neoprene between the clapper and the bell wall and produces a dull thud.   Suddenly you discover that while you've always believed you were wholly dependent on ropesight you use your ears more than you had any idea of—till now.  Which is to say since the last time you rang half-muffled, which may be this time last year.***  Leading is particularly obnoxious, because you probably can't hear the last bell's backstroke as you're yanking off your handstroke, and ropesight when you're leading is at best only half-helpful because that's where the break in the row comes—from handstroke to backstroke or backstroke to handstroke, as the first bell in the row follows the last bell of the previous row.  If you're the treble for call changes endlessly following the tenor while the other bells are swapped around at the conductor's discretion it can get a bit hallucinatory, not in a good way. 

We rang—call changes—on Friday midday to coincide with the procession around the churchyard.  I managed to lose track of time (how unusual) and was racing hellhounds home while the veterans were marching up Sheep Hill during the two-minute silence and as we spun round the Sheep Hill corner there was a Moron with a Dog—at least the dog was on a lead, but it was a loose lead and the moron was paying no attention to it whatsoever, and it promptly made a lunge for the hellhounds and . . . the two-minute silence was not successfully preserved.  But I did blast back to the tower in time to ring (clumsily).  Practise Friday night, still muffled, was extremely odd, with the good ringers shrieking themselves silly at us poor lost adrift nongood ringers as we attempted to ring methods, not merely call changes . . . although I had furtively staked out the five.  Number five bell is at the bottom of the ladder to the belfry, and the two trap doors between you and the bells are not the aural equivalent of double-glazed and even half-muffled you can still hear the backstrokes.  Mwahahahahaha.  This morning at Old Eden . . . well, I'm glad it was only call changes. 

* * *

 Meanwhile . . . between the rocket up the backside of this prospective hour-long lesson thing and the fact that the ME is still limiting my activities† I've been singing like a mad creature.††  Whatever this frelling mutant virus is it does seem to be showing some signs of clearing the hell off which means not only sitting down less during practise sessions††† but my throat may finally be shedding its load of persistent gloop‡ which would be great news.  

blondviolinist

. . . it wasn't necessarily a lack of dynamics that were my problem: it was a lack of the tone colors and phrase direction. I could hear the music in my head, but I couldn't make my violin sound like that. (Partly, I didn't have either the left- or right-hand facility yet to make the tone colors I heard in my head, but I didn't know that yet.) Everything coming out of my violin was bright and not nearly connected enough, and I was missing all the rich texture I wanted. Of course, I couldn't articulate any of that. I simply was frustrated.  

. . . Yes.  It's not even that I've listened to too much Beverly Sills and Cecilia Bartoli—it's not only them I'm hearing in my head, it's what I'm trying to do, even more or less within the limits of the voice I have to use.  If it weren't for Nadia constantly reminding me that the voice is a muscle and you have to build fitness carefully, correctly, and over time, I would assume that I merely have the vocal version of my maths brains.‡‡  You'd think, for example, that as I become capable of being louder I should also retain the ability to be softer, right?  Well . . . sort of.  But it doesn't seem to mean anything somehow.  Sometimes I'm louder.  Sometimes I'm softer.  Not nearly connected enough.  Missing the texture.  Yes.  Exactly.  I can do loud, and I can do soft.  It's like bumping a couple of bricks together.  No flow.  No connection.  No progress—no, you know, journey, from one end of the song to the other.  Bleeeaugh.  

Mismatched Socks

. . . you may be talking about dynamics, but not quite in the way you mean (if I'm right in thinking that you're thinking about the dynamic markings as something that would make the piece feel musical if only you could manage to follow them correctly). 

Well sort of!  I'm a natural going-off-the-rails person, and besides, I'm not trying to pass any tests, so if I want to disagree with the particular edition of a song‡‡‡ in a book, I will, unless it's Britten's or Schubert's own, religiously preserved. 

I began learning to sing five years after beginning to learn to play an instrument (violin), and one of the things that still trips me up all the time (seven years after my first voice lesson) is the difference between the way I deal with dynamics as a violinist and the way I deal with them as a singer. For instrumentalists, and for members of a choir, dynamics are a tool you use consciously in order to create the impression of a particular emotion, and hopefully to get your audience to feel that emotion. For a singer who is making her/his own artistic decisions, dynamics are the natural (ok, natural plus a bit of exaggeration) result of feeling the emotion yourself– the causal relationship is reversed (this goes double for tone color, and maybe half for phrasing). I think, although I'm not positive about this, that this difference fundamentally stems from the your-instrument-is-your-body issue. 

Yes.  I am certainly struggling with this—and you're right, it is different when your-instrument-is-your-body.  One of the things Nadia said to me last week—taking flamingly unfair advantage of knowing that I'm not only a writer, but a writer who talks about the story telling me what to do—is that singing is a form of channelling.  I channel my stories:  I need to get out of the way and let them tell themselves, with me as the fingers on the keyboard.  She says it's pretty much the same thing with singing:  you train yourself to be as good a channel as possible . . . and get out of the way.  I get this.  Moan.  I so get this.  I can't do it, but I get it.

Personally, I find that when I can't make a (vocal) piece feel musical, it means that I haven't yet made my peace with the text– maybe I find the lyrics too over-the-top to relate to, and still can't imagine myself actually saying them under any circumstances, or maybe I'm still a bit hung up on the foreign language I'm singing in (this often happens to me when I'm at the stage where I know what the phrases mean but not which word means what). However, I know an awful lot of singers who are not nearly as text-oriented as I am, and can manage to be musical even when they have no idea what their lyrics mean, or even which ones come next, so obviously different people approach this in different ways. 

It may just be that it's still early days for my singing.  I don't at the moment need to know what every Italian word means;  I need to know what a phrase is about, and then the music . . . erm . . . tries to tell me how to channel it.  With greater or, mostly, lesser success.  At the moment the wall I'm banging my head on is the connectedness, the flow.  That's why Nadia suggesting I think of every phrase of Caro being a sigh was so helpful.  

Julia:

. . . Not just with music teachers either- when I worked in the WritingCenterat my university, the same thing would happen to me. Time and time again, I'd find myself calmly and clearly explaining to a student about how he or she might proceed in organizing, clarifying, or simply beginning a paper… and I could help them. But when it came to fixing or even facing the same issues in my own work, I was just as stuck as the students I was working with had been. It took my professor or another member of theWritingCenter staff to drag me out of the hole. . . . 

Uh huh.  This is why I talk so little about writing, and am so reluctant to give 'advice' or even describe much about how I do it:  I feel like such a dork.  Yes, I'm a professional writer, have been a professional writer for substantially over thirty years (gleep):  obviously I have workarounds, I have ways to keep going, I have markers on the road.  Yes.  I do.  And they're all embarrassing. 

* * *

* Except when it doesn't.  I turned up for service ring this morning and . . . there was no one there.  Dorothy showed up shortly after me and we looked at each other in consernation.  Occasionally our flawless communications system breaks down.  I knew about the extra ring at Old Eden this morning, but that doesn't mean anything about New Arcadia;  usually on an OE day we merely ring both.  Dorothy didn't know about Old Eden, had made other plans and couldn't stay—which meant we were only five at OE.  I could have used that extra hour in bed.  When I cornered Niall after we rang down at OE he said he and Penelope would have been at NA this morning too if it weren't for a chance conversation with one of the Inner Circle^ last night.  I would have phoned you, he said, only it was too late.  It was after eleven.

            Snork.^^

^ Apparently Ringing Masters and Deputy Ringing Masters don't count 

^^ Although it's true I consider a ringing phone after about 9 pm a crime against humanity.  This is a tangential reason why I like staying up late.+  He could have texted me. 

+ Although this has been known to cause other problems.  That extra hour in bed this morning wouldn't have done me that much good since Crunching Driveway Gravel at 7 a.m. on Weekdays Man across the road started his frelling leaf blower at about 9.#  It sounds like a replay of the Assyrian descending on Sennacherib.  I'm assuming the Angel of Death in that case was noisy.  

# Nine in the morning on a SUNDAY.  At the mews they're not allowed to use ANY noisy machinery ALL DAY on Sunday.  

** I've told you this, haven't I?  There are proper muffles and half-muffles for bells, and for £14,635.99 you too can have a set for your bells.  Or you can go to your local tack shop and buy a few pairs of strap-on fetlock brushing boots and a few pairs of rubber pull-on overreach ankle boots and get out again for under £100, for the same effect.  The bells don't care.^ 

^ If you're Liverpool Cathedral, where the treble weighs about as much as a small town and the tenor is vast on a Cthulhuian scale, you probably do need tailor-made muffles.  The rest of us lesser mortals have a simpler situation. 

*** We do ring funerals occasionally, and occasionally-occasionally we ring them half muffled.  Half-muffled is terribly effective, and if you know whoever died it may be a bit rough on you.  Note that I want half-muffled for my memorial service, and then at some later date a really cracking quarter peal, unmuffled, possibly Stedman Triples.^   And a quarter of Yorkshire on handbells.  And if you fire out you have to do it again till you GET it.  

^ Or possibly Frelling Whose Idea Was This Gigantighastadon Megalolithic Sarcophagic Triples.  

† It is ebbing, it's just not doing it with any grace or finesse. 

†† No, not Lucia.  I have no designs on her at all.  But I am totally having a hack at Rosina in a year or twelve.^ 

^ I wonder how many seventy-two-year-old Rosinas there have been? 

††† And hellhound hurtles 

‡ Persistent gloop: you can look it up in any medical dictionary. 

‡‡ Although I'm continuing to have a rather goofy good time with my hard science books.  I did a little unseemly hooting over the maths puzzle in Awakening^ this evening however.  It's clearly aiming for the preteen girl client base which is fine^^ but I would have said that even preteen girls can do a little more than count to fifteen without dangerous mental overheating. 

^ http://www.gamezebo.com/games/awakening-dreamless-castle/walkthrough 

^^ I'd like the incredibly anodyne princess a good deal better if she had dreadlocks and a confusing genetic background. 

‡‡‡ I've also listened to Oisin, and even Nadia, rant too often about bad editing to take dynamic markings any more seriously than I feel like it in some paralytically classic teaching text.  I think someone on the forum has for example referred disparagingly to the plinkety plinkety accompaniments in the hoary old standby Italian Arie book that I, and every other trainee classical singer who has ever lived in the last sixty years, has.