It’s all performance. Isn’t it?

 

Bratsche wrote:

I don’t think that not playing an instrument well should stop anyone from getting one, if they plan to play it. The pleasure of playing at whatever level you can (and it will surely grow with time) is important. I know I’m preaching to the choir (so to speak!); but I think it’s even more important to reinforce that as it continues to become easier to listen to professionally recorded and performed (and possibly edited) music, because music should be also be made enthusiastically by non-professionals.

Siiiiiiiigh.  I struggle with this every ratbagging day.  Well, every ratbagging day I practise some kind of music, which is most days, even if it’s only singing There Is A Tavern in the Town while doing the washing up.*  I sometimes feel as if I’m back in psychotherapy, struggling with self-worth issues.**  It is really quite amazing that you can do something like write stories for a living***—which means that people are spending money to read them—and still feel that you have nothing to offer.  I have professional musician friends who admit to similar struggles, so it’s not just the notorious neurotic weirdness of writers.†  But it is hard to convince yourself you should bother doing something like sing, when you’re not a professional-quality COUGH COUGH COUGH singer . . . when you can just slap Beverly Sills into the CD player.††

I was moaning to one of those professional-musician friends about this and she said that she guessed that I was moving the goal posts on myself:  well, yes, but how can any half-intelligent amateur help it—when you can slap Beverly Sills into the CD player?  Isn’t it the same for just about everything, anything that has a professional division, and what doesn’t?  At least if you play tennis you’re getting lots of nice healthy exercise even if you’re not the third Williams sister, and if you like to arrange flowers your hall table looks nice.  The Muddles aren’t dreadful, but they have trouble selling concert tickets because unless you’re a friend or a relative you’d much rather, and very reasonably, stay home with your CD player than sit on a hard uncomfortable pew and listen to a bunch of variously semi-talented dabblers feel their way through a selection of standard rep.†††

So what is the point?  I personally find this to be a real issue.  I love singing, and I’m not going to stop—and this includes voice lessons with Nadia—just because I can’t see the point.  You’re all saying, if you love it, then why do you need a point?  Well, but isn’t music supposed to be shared?  That’s how I understand it—it’s almost part of the definition of music, that it must be shared.  If a singer/harpist/trombone player falls in a forest and there’s no one around to hear, does she make a sound?  No.  It’s like what I’ve always said about being a storyteller—you aren’t one unless someone’s listening.  A storyteller needs an audience.  So does a musician.  A big part of the reason I’ve let my piano-playing mostly lapse and am concentrating on singing is because the piano is such a relentlessly solo instrument.  Even if you’re playing with other people chances are there’s only one piano.

I know I’m getting somewhere with my singing not only because I’m a whole lot louder than I used to be but because of the stuff Nadia gives me to work on, to think about, the stuff I write down in my notebook—and then spend the following week trying to figure out what I mean, what Nadia said that I imperfectly wrote down.  The music I’m singing isn’t, I don’t think, any more ultimately difficult than what I was singing for her eighteen months or whatever ago, but the stuff she wants me to aim at, to remember, to juggle, has changed—even allowing, I think, for the patient teacher’s hammering out the 1,000,000th way to say something again in the resolute hope that the frelling student will get it this time.

But—why?  Toward what end?  Singing in a group is fun, but the group needs a purpose—doesn’t it?  Concerts are the obvious answer to that one—but then you have to convince people to come.

So, Bratsche, or anyone else, why should music be made enthusiastically by non-professionals?  There are other ways of learning to breathe deeply‡ and hang out with your friends.

. . . Ah Beverly, you heart-breaker.  Note that I am going to sing Una voce poco fa before my voice gives out due to extreme old age.‡‡  Meanwhile Nadia sent me home with a book of Mozart arias to try, recommending the easier one of Zerlina’s from Don Giovanni.  I’ll start there, but . . .

* * *

* I can’t remember if I told you that I told Nadia that Tavern was a good song for practising getting in and out of my chest voice and she said excellent, bring it along.  WHAT? I squeaked.  But I brought it in last week and she said, that’s great, now I want you to sing it in lots of different keys so you’re climbing in and out of chest voice in different places in the song.  —This turns out to be rather hilarious.  Also, when it’s just me and the hellcritters, my inner ham, who spends most of her time wondering why I couldn’t have grown up to be Ellen DeGeneres or Whoopi Goldberg so she could have had some fun, emerges to startling effect.

** While Nadia tries not to pinch the bridge of her nose with her fingers till she leaves marks, nor to think loud balloon-over-head thoughts about other ways she could earn a living.

*** I don’t say a great living—remember that JK Rowling is a one-off—but it keeps me in hellcritter food and chocolate.  I do try to buy fewer books.  And less yarn.^

^ I’VE ONLY BEEN KNITTING TWO YEARS.  HOW CAN STASH HAVE ALREADY TAKEN OVER MY LIFE?!?+

+ Stop that laughing.  You know who you are.

† Although Nadia, who is a soprano, assures me that sopranos are the worst.  Oh, that’s nice.  Maybe I should work on my chest voice some more.^

^ And give up my high B and its possible friends?  No frelling frelling FRELLING way.

†† Which I just have.

††† Although I believe the post-concert nosh is excellent.  If you listen to the singing you get snacks.

‡ Zen-style sitting, for example.  Which is difficult in an entirely different way, but does not require an audience.^

^ All right, don’t get me started on the benefits of zazen in company.

‡‡ Hundred Year Old Woman Has First Carnegie Hall Recital.  Film at Eleven.