Yawn
6:56 a.m.
In the meantime, I ended up staying in last night. We had a long and arduous choir practice in the afternoon, from which I came home vocally tired and physically exhausted. The music for this concert is challenging, and much of it lies on the soprano break for long stretches, so we girls come out of there aching.
On Friday, after the studio class, Vlad and I went out the Captain for pho again. It’s becoming a bit of a tradition, which is nice. She’s getting much better with the chopsticks. When she dropped me off at the music department where I’d left my car, she brought up the business of UpIands, saying that she too had been avoiding talking about it, how she realized that there was a lot of tension and ill feeling surrounding these events and that I am supposed to be her friend and she didn’t want something like professional differences to get in the way. I told her that I had already talked to the woman whom I knew she would be asking to replace me, and she’s giving the matter some thought, and that I feel it’s time I left the group. So, that’s done. I feel like a load is off my shoulders.
There was a concert at the department last night that neither of us went to. An old student of mine who graduated about four years ago and went to study in Paris returned to give a recital. I have mixed feelings about this girl. For the first three years she worked with me, we had a great rapport, she made good progress, and her 3rd-year half-recital was really good. But her fourth year coincided with the arrival in our department of the “new guy” and his consort, also a soprano, and my student got influenced by this blonde, glamorous person and started taking lessons from her while she was still studying with me. I was totally ignorant of this, even though everyone else in the department seemed to know about it. Her final recital was terrible. During the year she started to develop all sorts of vocal problems stemming from some kind of tension in the voice. She’d lost her ability to float sounds, the focus in her middle register was compromised, and there were things going on for which I had no explanation.
Well, when the shit hit the fan, as it had to, I explained to her that she had made a mistake, that you don’t go to a homeopath while you are under care of a medical doctor and not tell your primary caregiver what you are doing, because when the medicine he gives you doesn’t work, he won’t know why. I think she finally understood that she had done wrong. However, she has remained friends with these two upwardly-mobile people, and came here to give this recital in tandem with the other soprano, the husband accompanying. Oh, my former student is now billing herself as a mezzo, which I guess gets around the problem of not being able to float those high notes anymore.
Hubby and I had planned to go to a blues concert in Sutt0n last night, but the town is already an hour’s drive away, and we were both totally pooped, plus he had tons of papers to mark. I debated going to hear the concert at the department, but ended up chatting on the computer all night instead. I must admit that I am curious to know what this girl sounds like now, but not enough to hear this other woman sing. I heard her on the faculty recital (she’s not faculty, I don’t know how she pulled that off), and was extremely underwhelmed. She has a beautiful voice, but really needs to return to a teacher herself to clean up many of her own problems, including a severe lack of focus in the middle register. Hmmm. It makes you think.
Well, it’s not even 7:30 yet. In an hour I must drive back to C0atic00k to pick Buddy Boy up from the friend’s where he spent the night (they leave for church at about 9 and he must be gone by then) and this time I shall be über careful to obey speed limits. I’m stll so pissed about that.
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