Yesterday I had the first rehearsal for my October 1 recital. It went much better than I had expected. I was a little worried because 1. I had never tried to sing the entire program through to pace myself and 2. I had been a little under the weather. At my lesson the day before my throat felt a little "raw", like my vocal cords were irritated. It might be that I had spent the day before with my partner and when I am there I don't use my Neti pot in the morning. Also the aides clean everything to a faretheewell with bleach.
The three difficult arias went well. When I say "difficult" I don't mean in a league with Verdi; simply that they require me to be technically spot on. The highest note in anything is an A. I did better than I had expected to with "In Buddy's Eyes". Sondheim rhythms are very tricky. After singing it the first time I realized that I can sorta kinda listen to the accompanist and I will then know when to come in and on what note. "Vanilla Ice Cream" was no problem at all. I decided to pass on singing "Mon Coeur" and the "Habanera" because I could sing them in my sleep. Next week (my second and final rehearsal) I told the accompanist that I wanted to do a runthrough, including my little spoken bits, and his piano solos, so that I can get a sense of the pace.
Other things on the horizon are a difficult soprano part in Ralph Vaughan Williams' "A Choral Flourish", which I have not had enough time to work into my voice, unfortunately. I have been listening to it, and will hope for the best. It sits in a high-ish tessitura although the highest note is a G. That is the sort of tessitura that is comfortable for me if I'm singing a solo; less so if I'm singing a choral piece with noplace to take a breath. I may have to skip a few measures. We are singing it at 9 am this Sunday. (Oy).
Then I put out a bid to sing at someone's funeral. This is a woman who had been a member of the church for decades. Someone asked the choir director if the choir was going to sing and he said he didn't think so, because a lot of the newer choir members wouldn't have really known this woman (she went into a nursing home 3 or 4 years ago). I offered to sing Dvorak's "God is My Shepherd" because it was a piece she liked (I sang it once or twice on Good Shepherd Sunday and she came up to me and told me she liked it.) The choir director said that might be nice, and said he would ask the Minister of Music. If I don't hear anything about it, I will write to the Minister of Music after my recital. The funeral is scheduled for two weeks after that.
As for the "and". I never know what is going to unleash a floodgate of regret about the past. When I say "the past" I mean those crucial years when I was between the ages of 13 and 30 (which includes years when I was sober and no longer smoking). There were so many missed connections, bad choices, wrong priorities. Sadly, the more people damn me for feeling regretful the more painful it is because I don't just feel regretful, I feel that my feeling regretful is a character flaw. What happened was that I was listening to a radio program about a man who had been a major figure in SNCC. He used to sing with our choir (until he died) and his wife still does. It reminded me of that period when I was in high school when I was a little burgeoning hippie. That was when a music teacher friend of my mother's told me how impressed she was with my singing voice. I had spent my childhood imitating Julie Andrews. I sang in the school glee club. At the risk of sounding Trumpian, I do think the fact that I was not a minority with that particular vocal color made me not of interest to the school glee club director (who was white). It was the era of glorious African American pop singers, and less than glorious white protest music. A lot of the white protest singers (Joan Baez excepted) used drugs. I listened to lots of folk, rock, and other protest music during those years. If only I had not started smoking, which I did because I wanted to be stylishly thin and I thought smoking would curb my appetite. I was never clinically obese, but I was built like Kim Novak in an era when the idol was Twiggy. Really all I would have had to do not to throw my talent in the garbage (yes, I resurrected it, in part at 26, and then seriously at 54, but the big chance was gone forever) would have been to not smoke (or abuse alcohol and drugs, which I did later.) Basically I could have done anything else. Sing folk music, go to protest rallies, play hookie, neck promiscuously...
I realized recently that the reason I so loathe Bob Dylan is not only that his songs were part of the whole zeitgeist that destroyed me, but also that his voice so reflects what can happen to a voice if a person abuses their instrument. He was known to abuse drugs. I always said I hated the sound of his voice because it was too evocative of the wrong things, but now I think it's because it's a reminder of how I destroyed my own voice. I realized this the other day when I saw the text of some of his songs written down in an article I was editing, and realized that they are quite interesting, and yes, that he is a poet, but I can never bear to listen to that voice.
Then I snap out of it and realize that so many people have so much to grieve for, so many different types of loss, and I just despise myself.
You've described what you're feeling as grief before, and I think that's the right term. It comes in waves, some days are easier than others, the triggers can be unexpected and surprising. Grief, I think, also ought not to be compared to others' grief. Sure, there are people who have lost more, but there always are, unless you are for example, a survivor of the Rwandan genocide or something. But you are entitled to your own grief and entitled to grieve your way. It's not a character flaw unless you're grieving in ways that harm yourself or other people, and while only you know whether you are, that's not the impression I get from your posts.
ReplyDeleteThank you for your kind words. No, I don't think I've ever harmed anyone by grieving or talking about regrets, and I am certainly sensitive enough not to talk about things like this in the presence of anyone who has suffered a loss, certainly not in front of anyone who has suffered a loss recently, but I can't tell you the number of "lectures" I've gotten about this (I left another blogging community because of it and here I screen my comments). I never quite understood why. I don't really understand what other people get out of trying to "shame" someone (particularly someone they don't know, or know only through writing) into feeing better. About anything really. And if you ever read my posts about a woman named LC, I apparently so outraged her by talking about a personal problem (not even about grief, but about being angry that I thought someone took a video of mine off her site without telling me) a few days after the shootings in Orlando, that she wrote to me and told me never to contact her again. And this was someone I had known all my life, and with whom I had shared (at her encouragement) all sorts of confidences (and vice versa). I mean I understand that sometimes a person can get tired of hearing about [fillintheblank] from someone but there are polite ways of handling that.
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