The Usual Monday Stuff

 

I pretty much always come away from my voice lesson exhilarated, because one of Nadia's tricks is to winkle something good out of SOMETHING, SOMEWHERE to end on (I caught her at it today, so I was thinking about it on the drive home) but sometimes—no, often—this is as frustrating as it is delightful.  I WANT TO TAKE THE TEACHER-MAGIC HOME WITH ME SO I CAN USE IT DURING THE WEEK.  I'm sure I would get on much faster if it were like pills or something, and at the end of the lesson Nadia would hand me a little bottle and say 'twice a day, morning and evening, take with food' or whatever.    

            I also do know that voice lessons are like every other kind of lesson—or anyway I assume it's this way with every other kind of lesson:  it's certainly this way with every other kind of lesson-learning I've ever done*—that you have to take responsibility back again from your teacher and do it yourself . . . till you can do it yourself.  Nadia keeps telling me I need to figure on a six-month lag between the time she starts teaching me something on Monday afternoons and when I'm (more or less reliably) doing it at home by myself.  Don't want to wait six months!  Don't want to!**  And I've had this little intense rush of improvement lately—well, since I quit my tower.***  Although the foundation of this improvement is that I finally started breathing from my gut, which Nadia says I was due, on the Great Scale of Teacher-Magic, to do anyway, and you really can't do much of anything till you have the breath to support it.  But my own sense of breakthrough is that quitting my tower—getting out of a situation I found very oppressive—gave an extra charge, an extra release, to what's going on with my singing,†  and I think there's still some momentum from that rolling me forward.

            But not fast enough.  I missed a couple of days this week due to stomach flu and ME, and yesterday I had to work really hard to make any kind of a noise at all.††  ARRRRRGH.  But this morning was not too bad so I went off to Nadia hopefully††† and indeed was rounding up and getting my hocks under me‡ relatively soon—which she commented on.‡‡  Now the thing I've been working on this week is keeping the space up at the top end open:  asking your brain to tuck itself away‡‡‡ so you can have more empty space for resonance.  Nadia's been telling me about the singer's smile—that strange smile-shaped rictus that you see on the faces of a lot of classical singers—from the beginning, but getting it connected so that something is going on behind your face has only just started happening recently for me.  And I've been working on that this week, which is one of the reasons (I think) I opened up faster today when she was running me through my exercises. 

            So then we started working on Caro mio bien, which has been drawn back out of dusty obscurity again as a learning tool and . . . it all immediately went to hell.  ARRRRRRGGGGGGHHHH.  Well, you know, it's a song.  Exercises are just exercises.  Songs are scary.§  There's stuff going on in a song.§§  So Nadia, pulling her teacher-magic wand out of her sleeve, told me to sing it phrase by phrase—literally.  I sang a phrase and stopped.  And then sang another phrase and stopped.  You don't have to think about anything except one tiny phrase! she said.  Don't think about anything else!  And all you need to do during this tiny phrase is keep your breath going (which will mean that the top end will take care of itself)!  Sing it like you believe your breath will be there to support you!

            And . . . it worked.§§§  Eventually we put all the tiny phrases together and I sang the whole damn thing through with breath support and an open throat and top end.  Yaay.  In spite of what the churlish might call backsliding from last week, when things are free and energized like this you can feel the emotional, interpretive stuff poised to come rushing the frell out, whether you actually want it to or not.  Eeeek.  Scary.  But Nadia does keep telling me that if you can set stuff up well enough the rest of it just happens.

            Meanwhile . . . another week of practising at home begins.  Ah well. 

* * *

* Riding lessons spring to mind here 

** And if you learn nothing else from this blog, you have learnt that age does not necessarily mean maturity.  Tantrums just look sillier, the older you get.^ 

^ Although singing at my computer WHEN IT'S GETTING ON MY NERVES is . . . surprisingly effective.+  It's early days yet though,  I could still revert.  And the first shout of outrage—YOU FRELLBAGGING SODBLASTED GILGALDERAGDAG RAT TURD—usually escapes me.  But as I draw breath for the second volley I register what is happening.  And start singing.  Ee aa eeee aa.  Eeee aaaa eeee aa.  This may go on for quite a while . . . I'm not sure Peter has been present for one of these occasions yet.  He knows about the new system++ so (I assume) he won't immediately assume I've lost my mind+++, but they tend to happen after he's gone to bed when I often have a bash at the vocal art if I'm too burnt out to keep working and it's too early to go to bed myself.#

            You get really good volume when you're furious.  I've always had a cross-country bellow for recalling hellhounds## but trying to shift that, ahem, energy up into head voice is an interesting exercise.  

+ Hey—why are you laughing?  

++ Feh, he read about it here 

+++ Or that Nadia gave me some very strange homework 

# Having lost my weekly Sunday morning early-service-ring reset button I'm getting later and later and . . . I may just stay up all day some day, and go to bed the following evening at what the rest of the world considers a sensible hour.  I don't know though.  I might come all over strange if I tried to sleep before midnight. 

## Fortunately they indulge my little fantasy that I'm in control 

*** Sigh.^ 

^ Although Colin seems to have taken on the burden of keeping me going while I get myself sorted out wherever.  Not only, under his tutelage, am I being forced to ring Cambridge on another bell+ he made me call some bob doubles tonight.  Arrrrrgh.  It takes considerable force of will, harrying learners to do stuff.  When you're a visitor at another tower, the tower captain/ringing master will probably ask you what you want to ring or what you'd like to practise (assuming they have the band to support you) but they won't assume they know what you ought to be doing for your own good.  No, that pleasure is reserved for a ringing master who knows you well.  

+ You usually practise a new method on the same bell till you begin to know what you're doing.  Then you can try it on a different bell.  It's the same pattern . . . but you start in a different place in the pattern and all the other bells are obviously in different places relative to you on your new bell than they were on your old bell.  It is VERY CONFUSING. 

† And this aside from the whole throat-trouble-since-October, several-weeks-of-sore-throat-so-severe-I-couldn't-sing-at-all.  Now, however many weeks later I'm like, throat trouble?  I had throat trouble?  Really? 

†† Except at my computer. 

††† Only slightly cursing a beautiful gardening afternoon.  There should be another one tomorrow.  

‡ Sorry.  Dressage joke. 

‡‡ ::Beams:: 

‡‡‡ Why don't you go to the library for an hour or so, dear? 

§ It's also only just this minute occurred to me that I keep carelessly thinking 'Caro nome' rather than 'Caro mio bien'.  Caro frelling nome is that totally killer aria from Verdi's RIGOLETTO.  I couldn't sing it if my life depended on it^.  If I'm getting these mixed up in my head somehow it's no wonder poor Caro mio bien is scaring me silly. 

^ Well, not recognisably anyway 

§§ And, because I'm insane, at some level I'm thinking that I'll hurt its feelings if I sing a song badly. 

§§§ Of course it worked.  This is Nadia.