The texture of love

The texture of love is the wind in the trees

Elusive till you catch a scent the herbs in the garden

The tearing of thunder cracks us open

and lightening sparks in our eyes

The texture of love is in curtains which we draw each evening

The switch on the standard lamp to illuminate the darkened room

The hand held

The birds' rhapsody

The texture of love is harsh and brittle

Aching and profound

It is in the pots and pans and the rose in the jar

In the maps of our journeys

The very good times

and the bad ones

The smell of lilac

The gardens and homes of strangers in which we wander

In the care of the National Trust

The old van to whose needs we tend

The old hearts that break and mend and break and mend

The texture of love is in all these things

Stop doing that rain dance please

Inspiration is the issue as I look out on the drenched back gardens of suburbia. Surely I should be living somewhere more dramatic. Somewhere with mountains and tumbling waterfalls. Somewhere with a wondrous river estuary and a myriad of tributaries for me to explore in a canoe. Somewhere near to the sea but not near enough to be engulfed or crumbled off a cliff.

Pause for a Virgin to whoosh past on the railway track that divides my drenched garden from the garages of that other mirror road whose houses face away from us.

The lilac blossom has been soaked into rust
Loving it, the castor oil bush has doubled in size
Moody water-filled sky lurks over slate grey roof line
Light fading
It's just that kind of day

Pack everything up and vanish

MUSIC IS A JIGSAW

If Music is a jigsaw then very few if any of us get the whole picture and for many of us the picture is full of black holes.

Music is so beloved by so many people, but rarely does a mind come along that can encompass anything like its entirety. It isn't all of music that is beloved. I don't think there can be anybody who adores Death Metal, Puccini, Webern, Gilbert and Sullivan, Reggae, Adele, and the songs from Glee. But perhaps there is. What about someone who loves Ancient Icelandic Music, the songs of Cilla Black, late Beethoven Quartets, Kurt Weill, Perry Como and Wagner? I could go on with combinations but will restrain myself. I am finding them too diverting! It is a matter of taste. 

I presume that it is also a matter of how each person hears these various types of music. Being able to hear into the genre of Death Metal requires some bravery and for me it requires a muting of my defences. I feel invaded by this music. It encrouches on my sanity, as Stockhausen's Hymnen does when play through head phones. These are intense demanding tracts. 

But I also feel invaded but the insipid. By plaintive narrow voiced pop songs with the repetitive theme of loss of the beloved: Ouch you hurt me I will never recover.  Yet if you transport me back to Dowland's Flow My Tears Semper Dolens Semper Dowland Or Purcell's Dido's Lament I am uplifted by what seems now a much more sophisticated message.

That was just a tiny skim across the water of musical appreciation. But this mighty musical jigsaw contains so many more pieces. In places there are chains of interlinking pieces that require sequencing for strong learning to take place. Find your optimal hand position or your embouchure and you will liberate your instrument. 

There are also some sturdy little blocks that maybe be taken in isolation. Rhythm can come without pitch. Playing music from a script means that you can access huge swathes of the history of music, but reading music does't mean that you could attempt an authentic rendition of an unaccompanied traditional folk song. Playing boogie boogie is an art in itself and does not require knowledge on Chanson. 

Most of us can never aspire to complete the jigsaw. We can complete a corner and a big block to one side. We might have half the edge and a random collection of unconnected similarly coloured pieces that could fall in place given the right setting. We might complete a section from the middle with no way to link it in the rest. It is at the best patchy. It isn't a 250 piece job, more like a 25,000 one. 

In my daily life as a singing teacher I come across exceptional intelligence. After a day at work such people turn up here to be challenged deeply by music. The people that I refer to are high IQ folk who want to complete a part of their musical jigsaw that has frustrated them for years sometimes. I teach all sorts of people but this is one category of musical learner that I have just started to think about. I am quite intelligent myself, but have some massive black holes in my knowledge and understanding. My early teaching was very poor and I had great problems even approaching learning, let alone processing, sequencing and assimilating knowledge. Going out to work for eighteen years in Special Education resolved a lot of that but early born frustrations lurk. Harmony makes no sense to me. The nature of chords and the way they link up to form the conventions of either classical or jazz music feels outside my grasp. I could take the knowledge onboard as facts but it would mean nothing to my personal musical world where I create my own composition based on pattern making. Therefore I have not taken it onboard. 

I meet all sorts of musical learners, including people who have wonderful natural musical gifts and some who want to start completely from scratch to find the music within them. Sometimes the gifted do not practise. Sometimes the person starting from scratch finds the music but that doesn't satisfy their yearnings. It turns out that they wanted more of the jigsaw than was actually available to them. Wanting to sing soprano cannot create a soprano voice. There are some barriers that are insurmountable and then there are those that will dissolve over time with careful practise. It is the nature of my work to support people to overcome their barriers to learn to free up their musical world so that they can access enough of that vast musical jigsaw to satisfy them. 

Well I woke up at 5.20 and it is now 6.44, so whatever I spent the night thinking about has drizzled out into this rainy morning and I hope makes some sense. It is a great way to start the day. Sometimes I wake up full of a dream but today I woke up full of ideas. 

EMPATHY and THE ART OF SINGING

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

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

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 practice.

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..

WATCHING AND HEARING OTHERS

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