St. Andrew�s Day Eve

I have a love/hate relationship with Tuesdays. I teach all day, have choir after that, rush home for a hurried meal, then go to Black Cat for three hours of writing group, the one thing I look forward to every week like an addict looks forward to his fix. The problem is that I am so exhausted by the time I get there the energy to write is not always coursing through my pen. Still, most of the time I manage to come up with something. Tonight I wrote the following poem:

The smell of
fresh-baked bread
permeates

the entire house
which is why
I won�t

program
the machine
at night

as the aroma
wakes me up
too early.

Brilliant, n�est-ce pas? There were a few others along the same lines, but I thought I�d share that particular one with you.

My annoying soprano had a breakthrough today. She wanted to go over a certain second soprano part in the choir music as she�s having trouble getting the notes, and I decided this would be a good technical exercise, as it lies in the absolutely most horrible part of her range. Suddenly, without warning, her choked, nasal sound erupted into an uncontrolled head voice, a big and boisterous sound I had never heard from her before in the studio. I asked her what happened and she responded, �I got a �bursty� feeling and my throat suddenly felt more open.� She doesn�t like these �bursty� moments because she feels wildly out-of-control of the sound she makes, but I was delighted. I got her to go over the section repeatedly, trying to duplicate the first occurrence, and eventually she started to loosen up, the sound becoming more free, but of course it didn�t last.

Anyway, this led me to ask her rather pointed and invasive questions regarding what her singing teacher of last year (a colleague of mine who is a very good singer herself, and who has a reputation as a fine teacher) had actually taught her, and I determined that it was actually very little. They had discussed support and where the breath comes from, except that my student didn�t really know where her diaphragm was or what it did, and was totally unaware of which set of abdominal muscles she was supposed to use in the control of that organ. There had been no attempt made to open her throat or relax her jaw or get her to stop singing through her nose, and the instructor had written on her final report: The student has a small voice but is greatly interested in singing.

Now let me tell you about one of the annoying things this soprano does. If she finds something funny, she will burst out laughing, a loud horsy laugh which fills a room and embarrasses everyone present. She does not have a small voice. At all. It would seem that my colleague had taught her the requisite four songs (English, French, German and Italian) and prepared her thus for her final jury, but hadn�t gone to the bother to try to correct any of the actual problems she had singing this repertoire. I am just a wee bit shocked and dismayed, but just a wee bit, because it is a lot of work to do that kind of thing, and this is a very annoying student who is a challenge at the best of times to teach.

Anyway, I discussed this with her, not that she�s annoying, but that she seems to have quite an enormous voice caught behind a barrier of some kind, one which we have to break down in order that we can release the imprisoned sound and eventually teach her to control in a vocally hygienic manner instead of by strangling and stuffing it up her sinuses. Today we managed to knock a few bricks out of the masonry. I am hoping that we continue our �deconstruction� and eventually turn this girl into a reasonable singer. You never know. It could happen.

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