Category: singing

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Zoom Singing

I wasn’t going to write. I lay in bed telling myself that I didn’t have to write today. But here I am.

I didn’t write yesterday about the choir meeting on Friday. There were 43 participants and some of those were couples, so probably just under fifty people (about half the full choir) logged in I’m sure lots of people enjoyed it, but for me the singing part was truly awful. Because the way it works is that you can’t hear the other people singing, everyone is on mute apart from the musical director, so all you can hear is his instructions and the keyboard, and you sing your part along with that. For a start, I hadn’t realised that there was a link to the sheet music and audio files in the email, so I wasn’t prepared. The music was shared on the screen, but I couldn’t see it well enough to read without having to scroll round it all the time. We did two songs: ‘Panis Angelicus’ and ‘Somewhere Over the Rainbow’, both of which I know (though I didn’t know the alto part for Over the Rainbow). I had got the music for ‘Panis Angelicus’ because we were rehearsing it for the Easter concert when lockdown started, so I was able to follow that, and I have sung it before, but as soon as I opened my mouth all that came out was a horrible scratchy squeak. Horrible. It was like being before an audition panel, except that no one could hear me – which is strange, if you think about it, because if no one can hear why would that make me nervous? The thing is, I can’t read music, so I’m dependent on picking up on the voices of the other people singing the same notes, whether that’s the whole choir or just the other ladies in the alto section. Even ‘Over the Rainbow’ – which I used to sing to my kids when they were little, so you’d think I’d know it – was a struggle, because if I sing it by myself it doesn’t matter if I’m in the wrong key, and anyway, as I said, I didn’t know the alto part.

Well, that’s what I should have written about yesterday, only I didn’t feel like it, and today… Today I was originally going to write about anger, how angry I am with everything, with the state of the country, with the state of the world, with everything, with myself. I’d be angry with God if I believed in him/her/it, but of course I don’t, so that’s someone I can’t blame.

On Facebook yesterday I saw a Wordsearch, and the instructions were to share the first three words you noticed because that says something about you. The first two I saw were: ‘One’, and ‘Lesson – I was intrigued to find out what this ‘one lesson’ was – and then I saw ‘Strength’. Oh great. So is that a lesson I’ve learned, or one I need to learn?

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Singing at a Distance

A few days ago I got an email from the committee of the Friday night choir I’ve been attending (on and off) since I moved here, saying that they are planning a Zoom rehearsal for tonight. I’ve used Zoom, for tai chi and occasionally for meditation (I prefer the Sunday evening meditation sessions, which are by Crowdcast, which means my picture doesn’t appear, the interaction is all through ‘chat’ and as no one can see me, I can carry on crocheting through the talking part). Even with the tai chi, though I’ve been doing that every week (except once when I honestly forgot) and do speak occasionally, it never seems to put me up on the main screen (thank goodness). I don’t know why this is, whether there is something technical to do with my laptop, or my speech isn’t loud or clear enough, or whether even the technology can recognise that it’s better not to put my face up onto people’s screens.

I don’t really understand how the choir thing is going to work. Of course, I sing a lot by myself when I’m by myself, but that doesn’t have to be in tune. At choir, I usually rely on the ladies around me to get it right, and hope I can blend in. The email said that the Musical Director has ‘some ideas of things we can do’. Knowing him, I’m sure he’ll make it fun. We have the music we were rehearsing for the Easter concert (which was cancelled, obviously). We were also supposed to be doing a concert at the Guildhall last month, but we never even started rehearsing that. I haven’t looked at any of it for four months, of course, but I know where it is.

The thing is… I’ve really appreciated having Friday evenings to myself, not having to think about going out and interacting – more so in that I have to go by car, and finding somewhere to park is a nightmare – not just at the rehearsal hall, but also around here when I used to get back at about quarter to ten. There’ve been Friday evenings when I’ve spent half an hour driving around looking for a spot, and ended up parking so far away that I then had a twenty minute walk to get home (though that has improved a bit since the residents’ parking permits were introduced eighteen months ago, although they’re not in operation by that time of the evening).

Choir is one of those things that has caused me massive amounts of stress – especially around concerts – but that I keep bullying myself into going to because – well, mostly I enjoy it once I get there, but also I feel I have to go out and interact with people. And actually, it is quite non-threatening, because chatting isn’t compulsory, in fact most of the time it’s frowned upon. And they are a very nice bunch – those I know enough to actually speak to.

We’ll see how it goes.

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Pointless Pills

I was going to try sitting with my anger again this morning, then I got lured into Facebook by two private messages. You get into these conversations and then… you don’t know how to bring them to an end.

Then because I had the browser open to answer the messages, I started looking at the ‘highlights’ which Firefox puts on the page when you open a tab, and some of them look really quite interesting, so today I’ve already opened three… I must stop, I really must, or I won’t be able to write anything.

Well, what can I say, does it matter if I do or don’t write anything? Yes, some days it’s good, some days it’s not. It may be helping with the therapeutic self-understanding process, but it isn’t stimulating me into making progress on any of my three suspended writing projects, or to start anything new. Just more of the same.

It rained in the night, but the sun is starting to come through the clouds now. The outside table and chairs will be damp. What time will it be by the time I’ve finished this and had breakfast? I have no idea. What will I do with the rest of the day? Ditto.

I wonder how I’d be now if I’d carried on taking antidepressants? I started in 2001 – almost twenty years ago – and took them till the end of 2004, though I never felt they helped in any way, didn’t even improve my sleeping (which was why I started taking them). I kept going back to the GP and saying they didn’t help and he told me to take more, till I was taking four a day. I was taking them all the way through the two-year research contract I had from 2001 to 2003, last full time job I ever had, and when the contract ran out I knew there was no future for me in academia, though I kept on applying for jobs for a couple of years more.

In the summer of 2004 I went to see a hypnotherapist, she said she could solve my problems in six sessions. I did feel somewhat better and started to wean myself off the pointless pills. In that time I ducked out of auditioning for ‘Jesus Christ Superstar’, and she said that was good because I was ‘learning to say no’, but actually it was because I made the choice not to put myself through the stress and humiliation. Then later when I turned up to help backstage the producer asked why I wasn’t singing, made me promise to audition for the next show, ‘Titanic’, which I did, opened my mouth in front of the panel and what came out was so pathetic that the musical director got cross and made me start again. Completely humiliated – as expected.

So I weaned myself off the antidepressants, and didn’t notice any different, finished at the end of December 2004, joined a meditation group in January 2005

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Hedgehog Song

I’ve got into the habit of ending the evening by listening to Amazon music. I try to avoid watching telly after 10 o’clock, though I’m not always very good at sticking to that. I don’t really understand how these streaming services work, obviously they go on the basis of what you’ve chosen before but the random playlists can be extremely random. It’s moved on from giving me lots of Neil Young, Joni Mitchell, Crosby Stills and Nash, Cat Stevens and Fleetwood Mack to deciding I like early 70s folk-rock, which is quite intelligent of it really, though I haven’t heard a lot of those artists for a very long time. In particular it’s picked up on the Incredible String Band, which I didn’t know much about and I find their songs pretty mixed.

Last night it flashed up ‘The Hedgehog’s Song’ (by ISB) which made me laugh, because it reminded me of Nanny Ogg’s Hedgehog Song from the Discworld books. But as soon as the music started, I knew it instantly, though I don’t think I ever knew what band it was associated with. It was just one of those songs that everybody sang in the folk clubs of fifty years ago:

‘Well, you know all the words, and you’ve sung all the notes,
but you never quite learned the song’ she sang.
‘I can tell by the sadness in your eyes
that you never quite learned the song.’

Incredible String Band

Naturally, I sang along, as I’d probably done dozens of times in my youth in smoky clubs and pubs – it had a jaunty tune, quirky rhythm, and apparently silly but actually quite thoughtful lyrics. I thought about my eighteen, nineteen, twenty year old self not giving a thought to the woman who would be singing it half a century later and ruefully reflecting how accurate it was.

Sometimes with these songs from those days I think about the fact that the people who wrote them, if I could see them now at the age they were then, would seem ridiculously young, but at the time they were so much older and more mature than me, role models I admired and hoped to emulate. But here I am with all these years, experience and supposed wisdom, still haunted by adolescent confusion and doubt. I knew all the words, and I sang all the notes, but I never quite learned the song. You can tell by the sadness in my eyes, I never quite learned the song.

No, that wasn’t going to be me. I wasn’t going to turn out to be that sort of sad old lady.

An old friend commented on yesterday’s post that maybe heartache is harder to recover from than heartbreak. I think she’s right, because a broken heart is an acute trauma, that you have to deal with and move on from, but heartache is something that lingers, a chronic condition that fluctuates but never completely goes away. Maybe that’s why my therapist used that word. Interesting.

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Day 5 – Circle of Friends

Circle of Friends

Three months ago, or thereabouts,
a circle of friends sang songs of hope.

Knowing we must part,
knowing we would meet again,
but not knowing when.

Knowing there would be hard times,
not knowing what.

Knowing we would all find joy
not knowing how.

Another year, another song.

The memory of that evening comes to me,
and makes me smile,
for the time when we will meet again,
and touch, and hug, and maybe kiss,
in the place that joins our hearts.

Linda Rushby 5 April 2020

It’s good when a poem comes like that, when I was getting dressed, and making coffee, and feeding the cat, and taking pots from the dishwasher. So that by the time I sat at the keyboard, I already knew what I was going to say.

Sheesh, if only it was always that easy!

Can I get away with that today (at least it’s not a haiku!) or do I have to keep on writing? Well, I set the rules, so I guess I can do what I like.