Fun with your new voice

 

I’m not sure I can wrest an entire blog entry out of that title, although I can’t resist using it.* It’s probably a bad idea anyway partly because it risks just sounding like bragging, although anyone who has been through the voice-lesson mill knows that the opportunities for true bragging are vanishingly minimal:  it’s all, hey, that was less bad than usual.  Er.  Maybe.  I think.  As someone who also plays the piano with stunning awfulness there is a serious extra frisson of horror to the it’s your BODY aspect, especially, I suspect, for any of us who struggle with self-worth issues.**  At least if you manage to make a nice noise—purely by accident of course—out of a piano or a ukulele or a crumhorn, you can blame the piano (or the ukulele or the crumhorn).  If you’re your instrument you have nowhere to hide and nothing to blame.

Which is something Nadia has been saying to me for two and a half years.  Aside from the fact that I’m pretty much afraid of everything*** I don’t really know why making any noise is so threatening—why am I taking voice lessons if I don’t want to make a noise—but it’s like every time the personal door opens a little I slam it shut again.

I seem to have wedged it open this time.  I hope.  One of the disconcerting things is that a lot of what I’m finally doing right enough to be producing a noise is as instinctive, involuntary and generally non-intellectual as not doing it ever used to be.  It’s not that I’ve bypassed the ‘breathe from the abdomen/support the breath/lift the top end/get your frelling tongue out of the way’ stage, but when I was mired in it, knowing intellectually that I needed to support the breath and get my frelling tongue out of the way, it was like, yeah?  So?   When I kept having to stop and readjust—when I spent weeks at a time not really being able to practise at all because I tightened up so fast that my jaws and throat would ache after only a comparatively few minutes—there was certainly no music happening even if I did manage to learn a few tunes.  And then there were those wha’? moments, like the day my personal door-shutter fell asleep on the job and I had a lesson when I sang Dido’s Lament like I meant it—or any late night at home, because it occurs to me I think it only happens late at night, when my high B emerges from wherever and sticks around just long enough for me to check on the piano that that’s what it is.†

But, you know, I’m singing.  I was so anxious to demonstrate this to Nadia today that of course I made a mess of both Voi che sapete and Un moto di gioja . . . but I got enough right—singing not being like bell ringing—that she could hear I was getting somewhere.

I’M SINGING.

* * *

* Besides I can probably do something with FOOTNOTES.^

^ For example, I have a long-downing hellterror at my feet again.  Which means I’m writing this one choppy half-attentive syllable at a time (again).  It’s beginning to worry her that I seem to mean this long-down nonsense.  First time she gave up relatively soon and went to sleep.  But over the days resistance is rising.  Yep.  Been here, done that, wore out the t shirt in a previous generation.  Holly, of the pure-whippet generation, spent a lot of time on long down.  It was never really an issue with the hellhounds:  they’ve always been good oh-whatever sleepers.  Sighthound obstinacy manifests in other ways in the hellhounds.  Eating, for example.  Or not.  The hellterror is not a natural long-downer but she is a mighty trencherwoman.

It’s funny, though, because she is now usually allowed to mill around my feet and hope for fragments of chicken to rain from the sky while I’m putting hellcritter meals together.  Often she’s the only one milling, when the hellhounds have better things to do+ than eat, but if all three of them are underfoot she’s amazingly polite for something that is basically all stomach with teeth at one end.

. . . I am now eating lamb chops.  Hellterror would like to suggest that she would lie down really well in my lap.  Uh huh.  And the Pope is not Catholic.

+ ie SLEEP.  With their backs to the kitchen.  Just in case I had any illusory hopes.

** Last night at St Margaret’s the topic for discussion was around self-worth:   what gives us our sense of identity, how do we define our worth?  Another way of putting this is, how do we try to duck out of accepting God’s unconditional love?  Unworthiness as an avoidance technique.  Discuss^.

^ And speaking of St Margaret’s, you have heard me before moaning about the awful ‘modern Christian music’ schlock that we sing at the evening service and how frelling HARD it is to sing because it’s in a funny range—Nadia says it’s mostly designed not to frighten non-singers—and I keep swapping back and forth between chest voice an octave down and head voice an octave up because neither sits comfortably.  I’m pretty much resigned to not making a noise—and if you’re going to sing, whatever your personal demons are up to, you want to make a noise—and a few weeks back I pretty well gave up, and shifted over to bellowing in chest voice.  Last night, partly because I’d had a good week for singing+, and partly because I was standing next to Aloysius who has a nice strong tenor and was singing harmony I shifted back up into soprano . . . and made a noise.

+ Note that it’s been a sodding ratbag blister of a week in a lot of ways, and SINGING# has been a very welcome bright spot.

# and Street Pastoring

*** Yup.  Sunshine got that one from me.  Kes is, of course, out of the same dark dusty cupboard.

† Nadia got me up to an A#/Bb today—and I was shutting down out of eeeeep-ness rather than that’s clearly as far as my voice is going to go.  I want my high C back.  Which would mean a reliable A#, I think, which is a perfectly respectable mezzo range, and in the sort of community choir I’m ever likely to infest, probably first soprano.