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

Embrace me...

Monday, Dec. 3, 2007
11:29 p.m.
We got the snow today. Great chunks of snow. I got home from the university and after parking the car in the garage started shoveling out the driveway, promptly hurting my back and my wrist. So I finished the front walkway and porch and then came in and had a cup of hot chocolate with a splash of Amarula. Then when Hubby came home we both went at it. At times like this it would be nice to have a snow blower.

I did, however, get a real compliment from one of my students, the one who missed her lesson last Thursday and which I made up this afternoon, eschewing my rehearsal with Ms. Piano in order to do so. We’ve been working on Gershwin’s Embraceable You for what seems like quite a while now. She’s rather challenged in a musically literate way, even though she studied piano once upon a time. She’s blonde and ditzy to the extreme of the stereotype. Someone who graduates from the same programme in which she is presently enrolled called her “retarded”, which isn’t nice or necessarily true, but that’s the impression she gives.

Anyway, I went at the intro to the song with a fine-toothed comb today, working with her for five minutes on the very first sound she makes, a “duh” actually on an E natural at the top of the staff, which is a really lousy place for a soprano to have to start singing. It’s followed by a “zens” and then a descending diatonic line. We spent almost the whole lesson just getting a good open sound on the E, remembering what she did to get it, then continuing it all the way down, getting her to sing on the vowels, and all sorts of other singing-teacher type stuff.

Afterwards, she thanked me for my method, for taking things apart and analyzing them, because she felt like she really understood things better afterwards. I felt truly vindicated.

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