This week I had another disappointment. My voice teacher bailed from our joint concert. It's not the end of the world: I can do a solo recital. Unfortunately it won't be all that different from my birthday concert, but I will be removing four numbers and replacing them with others that I like better. I am going to drop the Jake Heggie/Sister Helen songs because they don't sound good with just a pianist and a singer (there is a major part written for a flute) and are not "enjoyable" to listen to. I am also dropping the Barbra Streisand song "Evergreen" because I sang it as a nod to "LC" the hateful woman who dumped me cruelly as a friend. And I am dropping "Et Exsultavit". I love singing it, but it's better as a church piece. Instead, I will be singing the "Drinking Song" from Lucrezia Borgia, and will (as of now) be adding "Cruda Sorte" from L'Italiana in Algeri and an aria from Orlando Furioso about love and courage, which I have heard Marilyn Horne sing. It is a bravura aria with a lot of ornamentation and I have fallen in love with it. And I will add the song "Ice Cream" from She Loves Me to the section for my partner (although she can't be there), because at this end stage of her life, what she loves most is eating ice cream. And I will ask the accompanist to play solos in between the sets so I can have a break. The sets will be pretty much the same as they were last time: Joy, Love, for [my partner's name], and Home.
The disappointment isn't about having to sing a solo recital, it's about what I see as my teacher's priorities. He said he doesn't want to sing this concert because 1. he has to go out of the country to see family (I am not totally clear about this because by the time he got to talking about this I had stopped listening but I think the reason there is a date conflict is because his wife's new job won't allow her to take a vacation sooner than that), 2. he is stressed out because his wife is not happy at her job and 3. he is stressed out because of problems in his building. What made me mad (to revisit old wounds) is that every year he sings at least one, if not two, concerts with his wife and various other singers. He has never invited me to sing with them and this now has been 8 years during which I have made enormous technical progress, particularly in the past three or so. Yes, most of the singers sound better than I do, but there is one mezzo who doesn't and last time when they sang as a quartet this was obvious. She has a pretty voice and has sung a lot of bel canto roles with the pay to sing outfit that my teacher sometimes sings with (he never pays them anything because they always need men) but her voice is very small and certainly I sound as good as she does singing in the sort of range that we would be singing in in this type of recital. So the excuses are a moving target. I don't sound good enough, these people all know each other, this particular mezzo is a close friend of his wife's, the decisions are not totally up to him, blah, blah, blah. Anyhow at my last lesson when he told me he was bailing from the concert, I really just lost it and yelled at him, which I have never done before. I don't think it did any permanent damage. The point is that I think it's a teacher's responsibility to try to provide opportunities for his or her students. A number of teachers have studio recitals. He has never been that sort of teacher. He's not what they call these days "a pedagogue". He's a singer who has a gift for explaining vocal technique to people who need to improve theirs. Most of his students are already singing somewhere (in the past they mostly came from that pay to sing or someplace similar). So I don't plan to go looking for another teacher. I suppose what I need to do is simply drop the subject unless he starts flogging one of these concerts and trying to invite me. I have been to a few of them but have never made getting there a priority. I think I will just pass on them from now on, similarly to how I don't go to any of these small opera company performances either. I will just mind my own business. If he starts flogging one of these concerts (I don't think there's one on the horizon) I will curtly say "Let's talk about something else" or find another "conversation stopper".
I think I'm also feeling cranky because I haven't had a chance to dig into the two new arias or do any of the administrative work I need to do because I have been busy with caregiving tasks, most notably trying to get my partner a hospital bed. It is supposed to arrive tomorrow and the delivery people won't move her other bed out, so I have to get the super to do it. I am hoping to get back to my regular practice schedule next week.
I also have to pick a summer solo. I gave the music director my preferred dates. He has two books of church solos in his mail box, so I had the admin photocopy the tables of contents. So when I get a chance I will listen to the pieces on Youtube and try to match them up with the readings for those Sundays. I am not that theologically literate, but I will give it my best shot. Otherwise I can let the music director pick something, which he offered to do.
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Monday, June 26, 2017
A Blessed Time and Some Thoughts on Pride
My partner is still alive, and is feeling better. She still eats very little, but seems to enjoy food more than she had been. She is more alert. I can have conversations with her. There was a low point when she refused to eat for almost 24 hours and then slept through the Tonys (something we always loved to watch together), but she is better now.
She had a wonderful 83rd birthday. In total, 5 people showed up on different days, one with decorations. She is smiling in all the pictures (I am not comfortable posting one here, although I did post some on Facebook, because the person who took them posted them on her Facebook page).
In a funny way I think I may be happier than I have been in almost a decade. First, knowing, unambivalently, that my main purpose now is to make the end of a loved one's life happy, I no longer excoriate myself for not having a career or looking for a more interesting and stimulating livelihood. Qualifying for Social Security helped also. If I am "retired" the focus is less on what I do or did for a living. And I don't have to feel resentful that I don't travel. I just can't do that right now. I don't have to apologize to the universe for it.
I am still singing, and am singing well. Sometimes sounds come out that leave me stupefied as in "is that really me??" Of course what I always wished for most of all wasn't just to sing well, but to have the sort of diversified existence that one has when one excels at something, particularly in the arts or academia, which leads to travel, public engagements (performing or speaking), meeting new people, costumes, and the unexpected.
I still regret the past. Saying I "shouldn't" is really not helpful. When I say regret what I mean is that almost anything I don't like about my life (that I might have had control over at some point) can be tracked back to bad choices I made beginning in high school. I am learning that there really were people, even people who were adolescents during that train wreck of an era 1964-1972 who did the right things. I met a woman recently who mentioned how much she enjoyed going to the World's Fair in 1964. She was there with a school choir. I remember my mother dragging me there and my being bored witless and cranky about all the mountains of food everywhere when I was trying to diet. That was the state I was in 99% of the time during adolescence, wherever I was, so I generally preferred staying home. Now I am, I guess, "serving a sentence" at home as a freelance copyeditor. I didn't appreciate chances to have a wider life when they were offered and available for the taking, so I didn't get to have one.
Yesterday was Pride Day. How different things are now. We are less of a subculture (life is less titillating and hush hush) but we are also less angry, even with all the collective societal anger at Trump and what the Republican Party is doing to this country. I meet lots of Lesbians now who are what I would call "wholesome". They are not in the closet but they look nice and are comfortable around men. If I were 25 now I doubt anyone would be telling me that I shouldn't "invest my energy in a patriarchal art form like opera". Through chance Googling I found out that one of the young singers who sang with the choir, whom I was envious of, is gay! She just got married. She is a pretty coloratura soprano.
She had a wonderful 83rd birthday. In total, 5 people showed up on different days, one with decorations. She is smiling in all the pictures (I am not comfortable posting one here, although I did post some on Facebook, because the person who took them posted them on her Facebook page).
In a funny way I think I may be happier than I have been in almost a decade. First, knowing, unambivalently, that my main purpose now is to make the end of a loved one's life happy, I no longer excoriate myself for not having a career or looking for a more interesting and stimulating livelihood. Qualifying for Social Security helped also. If I am "retired" the focus is less on what I do or did for a living. And I don't have to feel resentful that I don't travel. I just can't do that right now. I don't have to apologize to the universe for it.
I am still singing, and am singing well. Sometimes sounds come out that leave me stupefied as in "is that really me??" Of course what I always wished for most of all wasn't just to sing well, but to have the sort of diversified existence that one has when one excels at something, particularly in the arts or academia, which leads to travel, public engagements (performing or speaking), meeting new people, costumes, and the unexpected.
I still regret the past. Saying I "shouldn't" is really not helpful. When I say regret what I mean is that almost anything I don't like about my life (that I might have had control over at some point) can be tracked back to bad choices I made beginning in high school. I am learning that there really were people, even people who were adolescents during that train wreck of an era 1964-1972 who did the right things. I met a woman recently who mentioned how much she enjoyed going to the World's Fair in 1964. She was there with a school choir. I remember my mother dragging me there and my being bored witless and cranky about all the mountains of food everywhere when I was trying to diet. That was the state I was in 99% of the time during adolescence, wherever I was, so I generally preferred staying home. Now I am, I guess, "serving a sentence" at home as a freelance copyeditor. I didn't appreciate chances to have a wider life when they were offered and available for the taking, so I didn't get to have one.
Yesterday was Pride Day. How different things are now. We are less of a subculture (life is less titillating and hush hush) but we are also less angry, even with all the collective societal anger at Trump and what the Republican Party is doing to this country. I meet lots of Lesbians now who are what I would call "wholesome". They are not in the closet but they look nice and are comfortable around men. If I were 25 now I doubt anyone would be telling me that I shouldn't "invest my energy in a patriarchal art form like opera". Through chance Googling I found out that one of the young singers who sang with the choir, whom I was envious of, is gay! She just got married. She is a pretty coloratura soprano.
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