Not Dove Sei

 

She made me sing Dove Sei.  I went in there saying, I've only just started on Dove Sei.  I'm not ready to sing it.  That's fine, she said.  We'll sing just a little of it.

            And here I thought she was a nice voice teacher.  I also went in there with that first exercise in the Vaccai book with the consonant clumps and said, I can't read this at all, so I've been singing 'aaaah eeee' and she looked at me and said, that's fascinating.  I've never heard that before.

            I have almost no voice and I'm a moron.

            And I go up to my full hour lesson next week.*

            Whimper.**

            I also said that I had wasted a disquieting*** amount of time trying to get the flipping lyrics to fit the flipping tune on Cold Haily and she grinned an evil teacher grin and said that's folk music.  I hadn't really thought about this in a coherent manner† but she was saying you have a poem or a story, and you slap it on an extant folk melody and—good luck.  So the good news is that I'm allowed to mess around and make it fit the way I sing it.††  Also, bless her, she reiterated that my voice lessons are for my personal pleasure††† and if I want to learn folk songs to have more to sing while I'm out hurtling that's fine with her. 

            Meanwhile, back at the Handel. . . . I told her about the first two bars of Marilyn Horne and the rich furry mezzo student recital and she started getting that Teacher Gleam again and said, why were you looking it up on YouTube?  I blinked—because I'm used to YouTube as a crib—and said, chiefly for the rhythm.  I realised after I'd stumbled through a few bars of it on the piano that I didn't know this one—since I know the title and Rodelinda‡ I'd assumed I did, and was embarrassed to discover that it's just something I might hear on Radio 3 occasionally.  My ability to count beats is rudimentary at best and when I start sticking individual bars together into phrases it can get ugly.  So I check with YouTube.‡‡ 

            My alarm bells go off when you talk about rich furry mezzo voices, said Nadia, because you seem to like singing high, and have put yourself in the first sopranos at the Muddlehamptons.  If you listen to rich furry mezzos you are at risk of trying to sound like that yourself, which will make it much harder to free up the top end of your range.

            Gleep.  The things I have no idea about.  I do acknowledge the point about unconsciously having a specific performance of a song playing in the back of my mind . . . and I suppose as I may slowly be emerging from the totally hopeless to the may-yet-make-a-good-choir-member, which as of last week I have begun officially to hope for‡‡‡, I need to take this on more fully.  I will be arriving at a point where it's not just struggling through the dratted melody and quadruply-dratted meter, but will involve performance . . . and furthermore my individual interpretation, which of course she's already on about.§  But at the moment . . . the idea of trying to sound like anyone is a joke.  I'm still at the stage where just hitting the notes in more or less the right order at (more or less) the right speed is tightrope-walking-over-Niagara thrilling. 

            Meanwhile . . . I didn't go bell ringing tonight so I could get on with SHADOWS.  I hope you're impressed.  

* * *

* Well, maybe.  She's going to a voice-teacher master class next Monday so she's teaching from home on Wednesday for those of us so devoted to her art that we can't bear to miss a week.  I'm hoping her husband won't be there.  He's a frelling serious frelling musician and I'm entirely terrified of him.^  But he's also disturbingly free-lance and might conceivably be home looking after Stella.^^  I've had enough trouble adjusting to the presence of Nadia's mum on Mondays—it's Nadia's mum's house, and she takes care of Stella while Nadia teaches.  Nadia's mum is also a professional musician . . . but (mostly) retired, and I didn't know any of this when I began with Nadia, so it was a little late to have the nervous breakdown after I found out. 

            . . . However.  I nearly never got started with Nadia when I couldn't find the address.  Long time readers may remember this story.  I drove to the end of their village not having seen the road sign, turned around at the pub, asked at the pub, and the man behind the counter there said dubiously, I know all the roads around here and I don't know that one.  Great.  Wonderful.  Turns out the road DOES NOT HAVE a road sign.  Which Nadia had forgotten to mention.

            So now I have to try to find her house?  I wonder what she's forgotten to tell me this time?  It's in Rumbelow, so I know how to get that far—over the last hill behind Mauncester and straight on till morning—except that you have to plunge into the maze off the main road before you get to any of the landmarks I know.  You turn right at the aspidistra, left in front of the Horror at Red Hook, right again at the Sign of the Boiling Marmalade, and then look for a clear space among the trees, stop, fetch your sextant, and look for a star.  Any star.  

^ No, I've never met him.  Why would I need to meet him?  

** I've just had a bracing email from Hannah, who both reads the blog and receives supernumerary moaning when we talk on the phone.   She wanted to tell me about taking her daughter for her riding lessons this week.  Ruby takes both dressage and jumping lessons, one right after the other^, and she told Hannah afterward that the jumping had gone well but the dressage had gone badly.  But, says Hannah, from her perspective looking on, the dressage had been the 'better' lesson because Ruby had so clearly learnt something whereas she had pretty much smoothly done what she was supposed to during the jumping, and was riding much the same at the end of the lesson as she had been at the beginning.  So maybe my madly frustrating and head-banging singing lessons are really good.  Yes.  And too much of this goodness will drive me to commit hideous perversions like eating Twinkies and wearing beige saddle shoes. 

^ What it is to be young and stretchy  

*** Singing is disquieting!^  HAHAHAHAHA.  I'm so funny.  Sorry.  I didn't mean to do it, but then I couldn't not leave it in, could I? 

^ Especially mine. 

† Although I should have, since I was just complaining about the muddle of the long version of She's like the swallow that some helpful forum member found a few weeks back when I was complaining about wanting to know the rest of the story.   Some of those verses were obviously imported—they don't fit with either the meter or the melody of the version I'm singing. 

†† This is also good because I would so lose a competition with Maddy Prior. 

††† Even if occasional nightmares of beige saddle shoes do interrupt the flow. 

‡ Renee Fleming the 3 of December.  I'd better make it to this one.  Handel is also long . . . but not as long as Wagner. 

‡‡ I also said that it was mostly countertenors and I wanted a mezzo—that while I like good countertenors, and I'm a big fan of Andreas Scholl, for example—that the countertenors just didn't connect with what I wanted when I was looking for a crib, and Nadia said, that's probably because the physical mechanism for a man singing countertenor is nothing like how you are producing your voice.  I get along fine with tenors and—even better—baritones, I said.  She grinned the evil teacher grin again:  baritones are probably closer to how you sing. 

            Oh.  Golly.

‡‡‡ I had last week's voice again this week.  Yaaay.  And Nadia remarked again on the fact that all that work we did when I was buried under the Persistent Throat Gloop has paid off.  Then she licked her finger and drew a line in the air.

            And then she reminded me that if I'm serious about this better-choir thing I need to start thinking about learning to sight-sing.   AAAAAAAAAAUGH.

§ And stuff like thinking of the phrases of Caro Mio Ben as sighs was very helpful as a way in to thinking of performing rather than surviving