Lizzie Perring

WELLESBOURNE

2011-10-15T05:28:00.000-07:00

Teaching in my own home for the last eight years has been real bonus for me in many ways. Of course it keeps my over heads down and I have all my equipment and music at hand. I don't have to travel anywhere and can create a special relaxed atmosphere for my pupils. But having your front room functioning as a music room knocks a big hole the house and over time it has begun to feel that separation of home and work would be more comfortable. For this reason I have been seeking a suitable affordable place to base myself and have found that in Wellesbourne, Warwickshire. This is an exciting time and it will be great to get in the car and drive off to work again, returning home in the evening. We are hoping that a whole day will fill up with individual lessons and group sessions and we can have our lunch in the camper van.
Posters are in place...
Watch this space...

Oh dear, here's another bad hair day shot..proving that singing teaching can be detrimental to the control of hair..

Practising the Accordion: Carry on Learning

2011-08-20T10:14:00.000-07:00

Thanks to Martin I now have an accordion that I can manage. Thanks to Jacky I have some ideas about how one should fit ones fingers around the buttons. Yet I have a seemingly incurable desire to improvise and this won't quite let me follow the fingering rules. I just want to let tunes ring out and so I think I am probably making life a lot harder for myself than is necessary. In my singing teaching I recommend that pupils become their own best teachers, yet I am not, I think, my own best teacher on the accordion. In the good girl part of my personality I think I need lessons and should arrange this. On my wilder side I just want to roam free on this lovely box and invent things as I go along. I just need to remind myself that this lack of shaping up to rules meant that although I drove from the age of 16 a wide range of vehicles happily(and safely) on L-plates, I didn't actually pass my driving test till I was well over 30.
I think its the same thing going on here. I will get to a certain point where I have limited myself with the accordion if I don't go for lessons.
I am glad that I have these tussles with myself because they certainly allow me a good perspective into the ways that my own pupils learn and don't learn.
Anyway, I think I will now seek out lessons and start getting the most out of this new instrument. I love the sound and the easy way to pick it up and just play with others. So much less fuss than a huge hulking keyboard. Here I am with Andy in my first nervous blast at accompanying someone spontaneously.

BECOMING 60 and Musical Afternoons

2011-07-26T02:38:00.000-07:00

Well it happened as it does to all of us. One day I was 59 the next 60. It feels good to be called now a Senior Citizen and I feel proud to have got this far. Of course I am not ready to give up yet and shall just be carrying on as before. Becoming 60 didn't really change a thing, yet inside me I know that I got there and sometimes earlier on in life I just could not have imagined that. What makes me sad is when people hide their age or are ashamed of it or embarrassed in anyway.
I'm not going to bang on about age anymore. Its happened and the buss pass arrives sometime later on. That I will relish! But I hardly ever catch buses at the moment.

Well our musical afternoon this Sunday was just lovely. We had a fine turn out of people and so many different genres of music represented. My Auntie Norah used come in if my sister and I were playing music with friends as a teenager and ask:
"Are you having a jam session?"
We all thought that was rather an old fashioned way to describe our beautiful efforts. Yet I think a Jam Session aptly now describes what we get up to in these afternoons. It isn't about being in a position to reach a polished performance. You might get 10 minutes with someone to rustle up a piece that you have never seen before. You might have a little time with someone with whom you are regularly rehearsing, to show the progress you have made on a major project. You might discover the joy of singing in a group. You can pick up from where you left off at the last session. You might play some old favourites with new combinations of instruments or bring something you want to just perform in its current state of rehearsal. New connections get made and in between Jam Sessions people will meet and build up their relationships.
I hope that we will see more ensemble pieces in our concerts as a result of these music making afternoons.
So let's carry on Jamming!!

Live Music

2011-07-21T05:15:00.000-07:00

In the past three months I have been seeing lots of live music. This includes:

At Birmingham Symphony Hall the CBSO performed stunning Faure and Ravel to an enthusiastic yet rather tame mid week house. No encores.

No standing ovations. No whooping.

We were delighted by all the percussion..the gong that only got used once...the beaming castanet player..the cymbals...that snare drum hidden in the centre of the orchestra for Bolero..

Then there was the dancing, fierce concentration and dedication of the wonderful conductor.

..we both came away with heads poured full of great sounds and pictures....check out this
review for our concert

In Hay on Wye during the Hay Festival a great amateur string quartet busked through the day, rehearsed and then played a very wide ranging repertoire to audiences under 20 in a local school. We were at two performances and they were stunning.

Again, at the Hay Festival we went to see Hypnotic, the hop hop brass ensemble recommended by Barrack Obama and this was a very strange mix of authentic hip hop fans doing their ting with great fervour; mild mannered folk were getting groovy, but with much less vigour; elderly people sitting in stunned submission, sort of "doing their duty" for Hay and Barrack; and those people who walked out having tried and failed to cope with the thundering ear bleeding bass provided by a sousaphone, even though it was muted. Loving the dance beats, but having move to the back for the same reason as those people quit, the sound improved hugely and that's where a magical entrancement was taking place. An ordinary bloke with and ordinary missus had suddenly found himself drawn in by the rapping brass band. He left his seat in the manner of a cartoon character being hypnotised and started to gyrate. He missus was gob smacked. His dancing was beautiful and had a 70s feel to it, although he wasn't that old. He just kept moving further to the right and getting deeper and deeper into it. His missus and I exchanged charmed smiles. She tossed her arms up in bewilderment...Had this man ever danced before I wondered?

Anyway the happy chappy just kept on grooving and moving more and more the the right and..well we just moved to clear the space and then moved again and then actually AGAIN, which just left us the top step for standing clear of him. He wasn't using the cool rappers hand gestures...he was dancing from his spirit and he seemed so very at peace with himself. Scanning the audience seated around us, plainly many of them were not in that moment.

We left before the crowds poured out and so I don't know how happy dancing man's evening panned out, but I bet it was good!

This was a lovely episode..

www.myspace.com/hypnoticbusiness

If you are reading this and you haven't been to concert for ages then for heavens sake get out and go to one....

Best Wishes for a good choice on your part

accordion

2011-07-20T11:37:00.000-07:00

I have been banging on about turning 60 this year and now it has happened. Now I am a Senior Citizen and so will no longer apologise for forgetting anything...It is muddling really because partly you wants folk to dispute and say "You look so much younger" and yet you greedily want the concessionary prices now available for entry to all manner of places. Bus pass will follow shortly!!

For my birthday I was bought an accordion and this immediately plunged me into new bouts of practise in order to grasp it well enough to play something. I am sure my heritage is Eastern European as the very first tunes I make up sound so slavonic and plaintiff. Then I begin to realise that all manner of folk tunes are now within my grasp and even one that someone wanted me to play piano with is much easier than he seemed to make it out to be all those years ago.
This accordion is a middle sized instrument and so much more manageable than the full sized one I had way back, which was too heavy for me to manage for very long. We ended up buying from the accordion specialist in Birmingham that we had sold this heavy bruiser to. It was one of those delightful surprise outings that end up in being bought a present and so the coincidence that I had sold one to them previously was an added bit of fun.

The property where these accordions are repaired and upgraded looks like the last house standing after a particularly thorough bombing raid in the war. It is in the middle of a sparsely inhabited industrial estate and over shadowed by a huge towering pylon. Inside is an Aladdin's cave of accordions and workshops. Where the living room would have been a small curved stage fills one corner and the walls are lined with pianos. Out the back are goodness knows how many cases and other random unrelated items that are "being stored for a friend". Obviously the place sees some great nights in: a secret accordion hideaway...but probably not a real secret to any discerning accordionist. www.accordioncentre.co.uk

So now 157, Beanfield is home to my dear new friend the accordion and already I can play it much better than the one I had before. ButI am never going to be fleet of hand on the accordion. I shall never be able to follow accordion music. I shan't play great sweeps of popular music with um cha cha bass lines like my own Uncle Bernard could do with his very flashy glittering full sized instrument. He played in a dance band with his son John playing drums from a very young age. No. Rather, I shall play folk music and my Slavonic tinged compositions and work to find, arrange or write some songs so that I can have another means to accompany myself apart from lugging hefty keyboard out and about.
Playing with other people is going to be a treat:
Already Martin and I have tried Wild Rover!

EMPATHY and THE ART OF SINGING

2011-05-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

Being able to read another person's facial expression and body language in order to assess social cues seems to be to some extent contingent on being able to read oneself. The process of reading another is full of mine fields and we are all familiar with misunderstanding and being misunderstood. So we clarify with questions and through conversation we gather some general sense of what another may be feeling.

Apparently having your face injected with botox means that your face may not be able to represent you authentically. It seems to follow that if you cannot express yourself authentically with your facial expressions then you may not be able to read others facial expressions...there is some sort of sense of vibration missing.

So I am thinking that there is a parallel here to the singing voice...now that is a leap I know..but think about what the voice really is: It is a vibration. The vibration of my voice does not just arrive in your ears.

It comes towards you as a vibration of the air and some of it arrives in your ears

Ears aren't giant funnels to scoop up all sounds...they just take in what they can. But the sound of me to you comes in a much broader spectrum and so the vibrations from my voice enter your body in many ways.

When you stand before me and sing, your voice is read by my whole body. This explains why as a singing teacher I have developed a strong empathy for the way that my singing pupils are using their voice.

Hour after hour I experience my own and other peoples vocal sound waves.

I know what my vocal sounds mean and how to adjust what I am doing to free up my voice.

I do get a sense of how pupils are using their voices.

Last week my pupil had a frog in her throat and I cleared mine to help!!

WRITING IN A CAMPER VAN

2011-05-16T11:23:00.000-07:00

This weekend I found my Inner Gypsy. I was happily able to set up my computer in our dear camper van, Gladys, and take up the threads of children's story that I started last summer and carry on.

Now there are four chapters. It is set in Herefordshire and so writing it there is for me a real treat.

The view over Hergest Ridge from where I was parked was a lovely back drop as the creative juices flowed.

My Inner Land Girl spent the afternoons clearing brambles and nettles.

My Inner Hungry Beast ate huge suppers and I slept like a log.

All to be commended.

It is so hard to find the right time and space for writing. Creativity sometimes requires quite special conditions: Certainly at home writing takes the back seat and even my own singing has to wait its turn. Housework, paperwork, teaching, cooking, gardening, family. All these come first at home.

But away from home with our lovely old Talbot Autosleeper parked somewhere with a view, well that seems to be quite another proposition.

Creative fire burns internally and must be given time and space.....

WITHOUT AUTO TUNE

2011-04-19T07:01:00.000-07:00

I recently read an insulting comment on one of my pupils youtube site. It was a school child bully I am guessing but it mentioned her need for auto tune...well hey ho I thought. This is such an ignorant comment I shall have to rant on my blog. This singer has perfect pitch, which is an awesome and wondrous gift. It is also a serious problem at times. The recording she has made was more or less a live recording. It was in a small studio with one take on the vocals. We did not want to magic up perfection as the live sound is lovely.

On the subject of perfect pitch: If anything around her is off pitch she struggles to cope. This makes it hard for her in duets, especially acappella. No matter how wonderful the other singer's voice is, they may slip down in pitch slightly. When this happened to this singer she had a crisis with her own pitch and felt awful. I stepped in gave quiet chords to get them back into pitch. She has come to realise this and can now compensate, but it used to physically upset her in a powerful way. She has an innate sense of her own perfection of pitch.

I hear now that karaoke is sung through auto tuners sometimes. What fresh hell is this? Not only are people now deeply confusing art with sport by singing in a race to keep up with automated backings, but they are also reaching new heights of NOT LISTENING, by not having to listen.
Auto tune belongs in the studio where it is brilliant for tweeking those moments that used to have be re recorded by bouncing in. Auto tune saves studio time and money. I get that: Studio time is very expensive.

Without auto tune we have the natural voice which fluctuates between perfection and its unique quirkiness. Without auto tune we are forced to listen so intently that it is meditative.
Without auto tune we are communicating our natural gifts which we have honed through thousands of hours of practise.

For every one minute of our most perfect version of our music, these thousands of hours lay beneath the surface. We are not perfect. We have to work so hard to get a hundred miles near that state. In any case it seems to me that perfection may have its own kind of ugliness. What on earth is a really perfect sound? One that formed of a sine wave? A pure clear voice in cathedral? A characterful beguiling beauty? A wonderful top note from a richly toned diva? A raw pounding? Is perfection tranquil? Is it loud or soft? Is it ever to be found in low notes? Is it sung in German or in medieval French? Is it a lovely glossed up and auto tuned girl or boy singing a pop song that will be popular for two or three months? Is it in the fabulous Young at Heart? The Kings Singers? It is my dearest wish that we make live sounds with our voices, learn to tune into others and carry on developing as listeners.
The world so needs listeners..
I hope you enjoy my selections..
Lizzie

ONE FOLLOWER!

2011-04-18T08:02:00.000-07:00

I am so impressed to have a "follower"!! maybe one day I will have 2 or even more...I think I have missed the point though, because I am not following anyone else's blog, so why should anyone follow me? It is a simple and fundamental point, but crucial. I think it comes under Thought for the Day status...this is a mini blog..a sort of confession and one that will lead me to be more generous and explore others blogs before I deliver my next offering to my one follower...
Lizzie

WATCHING AND HEARING OTHERS

2011-04-16T03:21:00.000-07:00

There is no doubt that we all benefit from getting out there to see and hear what others are doing! The temptation to just work in a very focussed way in that well known vain mission to clear the ever re-filling in tray is one we all need to step aside from. So I am in the middle of an events sandwich...2 down and 1 to go..Thursday was seeing my ex pupil Leila in a Youth Theatre production at the Loft in Leamington Spa. last night was Royal Opera House to see Terry Jones and Anne Dudley's Opera Shots "Doctors Tale" and tonight I am off to see pupil Ash and ex pupil Sam in Fiddler on the Roof at the Spa Centre in Leamington, with musical friend Buddug. It wasn't planned as a trio of exciting nights out. It just happened that way. I am so glad to be forced to drop the baton and buzz off all over the place.

At the ROH the first operetta of the evening, which was Edgar Alan Poe's story "The Tell Tale Heart" was set by Police's Stewart Copeland. I used to be such a fan of Police and here I am with much time elapsed finding Stewart C. has evolved into a considerable composer who can create great ensemble work and orchestration. The rhythmic beats and piano clusters give away the drumming background. Even celebratory spotting him in the interval was a thrill. Shamefully I know nothing about his interim period, never reading the music mags that would have kept me more up to date.

Terry's and Anne's operetta was such a tour de force. Such fun and so loving. The earnest doctor who is a dog is admired for his common sense and deeply caring style. His patients adore him. But he is a dog and GMC decide to hold him to account and want him de registered. Anne Dudley was one of the founders of "The Art of Noise" who produced experimental and often beaty tracks in the 80s. I remember getting kids with learning difficulties to choreograph some of their tracks. The were an undercover band and at the time no one quite knew who they were. Anne's flair for orchestration is incredible. The opera gels together and flows seamlessly with little splashes of colour suddenly outstanding: the harp, the bass clarinet, a sudden jazz solo from muted trumpet. Most singers morph rapidly from one character to another. (I was sitting next to the proud mum of one the performers and she was ecstatic about her tall son who slipped between 3 roles easily)
No mics for these singers with robust musical lines and wide ranging tunefulness. I so hope ROH will proceed to commit to further of these Opera Shots. I also love the use on unusual creative forces.

As well as a visit to the portrait gallery, followed by witnessing a freeby a rehearsal at the Royal Festival Hall of some beautiful Indian music and dancing, our day out in London included us witnessing the arrest of an Ice Cream Salesman and the detention of his van by 8 undercover heavy duty cops in Covent Garden. This dramatic event was a spontaneous piece of classic farce. With the cops swarming over the van and the wretched ice cream man hauled from his driving wheel, the intensity of the situation was too bizarre to take seriously. At any moment surely they would they all break out laughing and serve themselves Mr. Whippees with double flakes? One grandad with two little girls in tow innocently approached to order ice creams and then quickly hustled his puzzled grand daughters away when he realised somewhat late what the situation was. A boldly nosy man on a bike pulled up and stuck himself about a yard away from it all and just openly stared and stared till it was through. Whatever the risk that the ice cream man and van was posing, all in all we had a very good show. We sat with our beers and just lapped it all up. I must say there is so much entertainment on the street, intentional and also like this unintentional, that a visit to London is a fine thing.
Lizzie

MY MUSIC MAKING LIFE: a little diary entry

2011-04-11T09:16:00.000-07:00

I cannot commend live music making to you more strongly. Sometimes it is a formal concert. Other times it is just dropping into an event, or jamming with friends. The wonderful spontaneity of being able to pick up something and go with it and the sheer pleasure in the give and take of playing together.

I was music making with friends and pupils this weekend. On Saturday a group of us turned up at a party to celebrate the opening of Lensart's new garden studio. Kevin and Janet are wonderful friends of Unlock the Music. Elizabeth played three flute pieces with backing tracks, Matt and Mel gave a short acoustic set and Andy sang his most dramatic and exciting songs with piano and then launched into a short set of folk songs.

On Sunday we piled over to a friends house nearby to experiment with new musical partnerships and material. Present were Miles on lute and classical guitar, Elaine, who sang some traditional songs in close harmony in a trio, Matt on guitar who accompanied me on a couple of folk songs and then Elaine on Scarborough Fair, providing the Simon and Garfunkel backings; Buddug, who conducted and sang in the trio and then tried some Renaissance songs with bawdy words with Stella accompanied by lute; Stella, who claims not to be able to sight read but does seem able to when stood next to Buddug; Colin who no one knew used to play classical guitar and may bring that along next time, but had just come along to bring Stella. Andy cycles everywhere and arrived with drum to accompany his Wraggle Taggle Gypsies rendition and also sang in Welsh to Buddug to her surprise and utter delight. He sang "Flow My Tears" with the lute. Next time there will be potentially music with 3 guitars and music for flute and lute.

Today my singing pupil Austin, who is 80 was singing at his absolute peek in his lesson. I invited in someone to listen to his performance and we were both wowed by the huge power and emotional intelligence of his singing. This is a man that the infamous X Factor rejected. What could have been more of wow for them than an 80 year old who can lift the rafters with his sound? They just couldn't imagine it I suppose. He waited for 9 hours the first day to be invited back to the 2nd day. Then he waited for 6 hours the 2nd day to be told no thanks by two young women. What can that show be about? It certainly ain't about talent and beauty. Now Austin is saving every scrap on money he has to make a CD. Music uplifts him and puts him back on top. He is an amateur with such a great gift. Being there with him as his teacher and accompanist is such a privilege.

So this is a short entry really just to promote the value of live music making in our world. many of us love to do this and many excellent performances were born of these jamming sessions. My head is full of a new song that is trying to force its way through. There is also the half finished song I have been trying to write for my daughter's wedding. Then there is the story that is simmering and all manner of other creative thoughts. Oh for 2 weeks at the seaside beach combing..
I promise to rant a bit more next time!
Lizzie

HD LIFE!

2011-04-06T22:15:00.001-07:00

Unlock the Music

Family life centres around a hyper real presentation of our human activities. The giant flat screen provides a portal to war and global melt down, whilst glossed up avatars compete against flawed human wannabes in endless feedings to the lions. Hyped up and dangerously angry folk just like the folk next door fall in and out of life's tangles. Just like the folk next door nothing is ever straightforward.
Outside its bluebell time.
Just like the rest of the street they all watch sexed up hyper beauties glide in one another's arms in endless competitions for other sexed up hyper beauties.
Did someone just sit down quietly to reflect?
Upstairs mass atrocities are enacted in hyper reality on smaller screens and out in the car tiny hands twitch on endless battles for supremacy.
Birds are singing in vain
Cats purr unattended
Going for a run in surround sound
Even the bank and the chemist have completed the experience of queuing with a liquid aural and visual drip drip of happy clappy advise with steers to the temptations to purchase.

Was that the sound of a cello?

Hello?
Hello in there!!
HD Life is morphing our perceptions. No longer can ordinary human endeavour be laudable. It has to be more than a buffed up super quality, perfect experience or it is rejected as naff.

Here is my premise.
We can't keep up with ourselves like this. We can't afford it all for a start. We can cut and polish our lives till they are crystal clear.
Zoom here.
Glide there.
But the rub is that all this means more and more work to sustain it: Just when you get your legs waxed to high gloss, the hairs start to grow again. Nails chip. Hairstyles go out of fashion. Every penny invested in these things is thrown at one time experiences.

Did someone just pick up a flute?

Live Music is not HD.
It is not perfect.
It is not flawless.
It is about serious personal endeavour. Hours and hours and hours of it.
It is about deep focus and preparation.
It is about interaction.
Deep communication.
Sensual highs.
Emotion.
Struggle.
Challenge.
Fear.
Anxiety.
Concentration.
Cooperation.
Turn Taking.
Close observation.
Tuning into the sheer wonder of the human form
Sitting still
Being quiet
and
Listening
Listening
and hopefully
Applauding
WHY NOT STEP OUT OF HD AND INTO REALITY WITH AN UNLOCK THE MUSIC CONCERT:
YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT YOU ARE MISSING!!
Lizzie