Elgan speaks
...and her words thunder across the land

Wherein I use a lot of italics which make me sound rather erudite and professional.

Saturday, Feb. 11, 2006
10:29 a.m.
The concert last night was amazing. The singer was wonderful, her deliveries, her personality onstage, and her voice. She was so nice! The trio backing her up were all our guys from the department, Grandpa Mike on guitar, Kevin O on drums and DG on bass. They were really good too, and the guest performer kept remarking on how blessed she was to be working with such fine musicians. I felt that we were blessed to have her in our midst.

She was just as warm and engaging offstage as she had been on. We hit it off immediately. Her masterclass was good too, although, as Mike said later, she could have been a little more �teacherly�. For instance, our staff accompanist, who is not a singer and has never studied singing, got up and sang Cry Me a River. It was pretty obvious at the start that the key was too high for her. So she was advised to drop it, which she did, which meant she was constantly going over the middle-of-the-staff break in the soprano voice, which is the equivalent of where guys flip into falsetto. Most trained singers have learned how to deal with the passagio, bringing the headier quality of the upper voix mixte down into the lower, because it is very dicey and a little dangerous to try to bring the chest up past that point. Anyway, our girl sang either in head or chest, there was no middle ground, and it was very strained for her. The guest singer told her that she should practise vocalizes to smooth that area, make the transition easier, but she didn�t tell her what kind of exercises to do. This would have been helpful because FP doesn�t have a singing teacher, so no one�s nose would have been put out of joint.

The surprise of the afternoon for me was our flute player, the guy I had lunch with a while back. He didn�t sing in the class itself, but afterwards she got everyone up on stage to try a little scat singing to LuIIabye in BirdIand, and this guy got up there and totally blew me away. I didn�t even know he could sing, and there was this gorgeous, in-tune tenor voice that just flowed out of him so beautifully.

After everyone had packed up, the singer and I chatted for a while about teaching singing, encouraging students, working with an ensemble, etc. She is just so nice, and we agree on so many things. We exchanged email addresses and hopefully we�ll keep in touch. I felt like I had met a kindred spirit.

Little Princess never made it to the concert last night. Her boyfriend told me that the singer in their band had taken her home after practice because she was throwing up and �deathly pale�. When I got home she was fast asleep. Just now we were watching some of the Olympics from Turin. The Canadian women�s hockey team just destroyed the Italians 16-0, and Russia won in the pairs short-programme figure skating. A Canadian woman won the downhill mogul skiing, which is nice. We usually do pretty well in the winter Olympics, which makes up for how poorly we do in the summer games. After all, mon pays ce n�est pas un pays, c�est l�hiver.

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