And there was singing, and there was dancing...

Hubby has arrived safe and sound at his parents’ place in B0nita Springs, so I can stop worrying about him and get onto the serious business of trying to make myself thin and beautiful for our trip to the D0minican RepubIic in two weeks’ time. Can I make it? Anyone want to lay odds?

I’m finding the teaching of singing rather frustrating at the moment. I have one student from the college who has no musical background and can’t read music at all. Between now and the end of the semester, she has to learn a 10-minute programme for her jury (about four songs) and I have serious doubts as to whether this can be accomplished. She has some fundamental technical difficulties that I want to smooth out, plus teach her some basic sight reading and ear training, and because my own piano skills are so awful, I can’t play accompaniments for her so she gets a better idea of the underlying harmonies of the pieces I’ve picked out for her. We both realize that we’re up against a challenge here. Also, she is a very busy girl, and isn’t practising daily. She actually asked me if, after four lessons, she has improved at all and I found a few positive things to say, but I ended by telling her that the real improvement would come when she practised regularly. Let’s keep our fingers crossed on that one.

The second student I had today is in a different situation. She already has a good background, having played the flute in high school and done some composing. She looks at the music and tries to follow all the composer’s directions: dynamics, tempo changes, etc. but her technique has big holes in it and I would really rather she just sing the notes on the page and not worry about the interpretational stuff until she can actually do the grunt work. So there’s another frustration, keeping her happy musically while I try to build her up technically. Unlike the first girl, though, she’s getting lots of repertoire under her belt; but then, we had all last term for that too. Oy.

In belly dancing we’re working on a choreography for our show on June 9. Lise also has found a song that she wants me to sing. Patsy sort of got me into that and I stupidly agreed to it, saying that I could sing anything, as long as it wasn’t country-western. Oh god, what have I done?

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