Had my first lesson in nine weeks yesterday. It was rather odd. I had better breath control than before (which surprised the hell out of me--I hadn't expected that!) but my voice seemed reedy, thick, inflexible. It was interesting, from a purely scientific position, to observe how nine weeks had affected me. I was able to remember quite a bit but it will be a while before my voice is where it was before the break. Still, I was relieved that I remembered as much as I did. (I swear, I figured I'd have to reinvent the wheel. That can happen if one gets off track vocally.)

I should qualify--it has nothing to do with my teacher: I've been quite lazy; I've only sung at church, so haven't stretched my cords out the whole time. Still, it was gratifying to know the technique my teacher had given me held up through the lean time.

It was odd because my teacher had had a health scare during the break and so we were both kind of feeling our way tentatively through the lesson. Still, mainly thanks to him, it went well, I think. 

It will be interesting to see what happens the next couple of months--stay tuned...

Drogging

I can't believe nobody has come up with the term "Drogging" before (OK, forgive the naivete...haven't actually checked, cos, hi, I'm DROGGING, dammit!).
Drogging=drunk blogging.
You'd think this would be all over the internet considering 85-90% of blogs likely are drogged....just sayin'...or is it just me? Gawd knows most posts read like...OK, I'll shut up now...
RM

If you want to make an apple pie from scratch....

....you must first invent the universe.
--Dr. Carl Sagan

Hoo, doggies, am I ever finding that to be true this week.

I'm writing...but in the process, I'm also having to re-teach myself all the skills I thought I had learned in school, but, it turns out, I somehow managed to either forget--or forgot that I never really learned, and simply skated by with as little actual work as possible...which pretty much describes my college years perfectly ("Oh, that I had applied myself to homework for my other classes with the zeal I spent on my musical training!" she wailed, hand dramatically draped across forehead). So, in addition to writing, I'm learning how to do research online, format my writing so that an editor won't snicker at me (OK, not as much), syntax, rhythm, grammar--all of it. The Elements of Style and The Chicago Manual of Style, my computer, and Wikipedia are constant companions.

Considering how good I was at weaseling OUT of homework all my educational life, I suspect my teachers are laughing their collective arses off somewhere at my toil, sweat, and confusion.

(Kids, here's my unsolicited advice for the week, re: grammar, syntax, sentence structure, etc.: DO THE WORK NOW, while you're still young and in school--it's a hell of a lot harder to make this information stick when one is over forty and having to come up to speed from long-time inertia. Trust me on this.)

So, in short: in order to be able to take myself seriously as a writer, I'm having to invent the universe before I can bake my apple pie.

Oddly, I am OK with this.

RM

Ch-Ch-Ch-Ch-Changes

Hello, all.
As usual, it's been an aeon or two since last I posted. My personal journal and the little tidbits of wit that get shat upon my Facebook page (AKA the ADD child's Happy Place) have gotten the majority of my writing time for much of the past few years.

But.

Things, O my Droogies, have changed a bit 'round here, and I figured I'd best fill you in.

I'll try and sum up the last two years in as much of a Readers' Digest way as I can. I haven't given you NEARLY as much information as I could have ('cause, hey, it's personal, OK?), so it may take a bit. Here goes:

Mid--2011: Lost one of the dogs. In the same week, wound up getting BACK together with ex-bf from previous posts, that I was still in love with. Would like to say something about lightning striking twice, but it pretty much went exactly the way our first go-around did.  Zap-fizzle. 'Nuff said about THAT.

January 2012: Was not offered a full-time slot at the opera. Decided I'd had enough of being jerked around and, for the first time ever, turned down the extra chorus offer. Went through major depressive episode at the thought of not having enough gainful employment to survive. Pulled self up by bootstraps emotionally and began to tentatively explore possibility of finally putting my money (or the lack thereof) where my mouth was, moving away from singing as a career, and doing something else with my life.

March 2012: Proving yet again that "If you want to make God laugh, tell him your plans," a full-time contract (filling in for a colleague who had to take a last-minute leave to care for an ailing relative) got dropped into my lap....TWO WEEKS before start of rehearsals. I had to drop all my nascent plans and completely rearrange my life to accommodate this change, but it was worth it for one reason: I got to sock away money like a crack-addicted squirrel in anticipation of the next jerking-around that surely was headed my way. (I'd lived on poverty rations for so many years that having a regular paycheck, and saving a chunk of it each week, was painless.)

May 2012: Had a reckoning with the ex-bf, who had been lingering in my life despite my repeated attempts to move on, where we finally made peace with each other. In what has to be one of the biggest ironic moments in recorded history, at the end of a gut-wrenching five-hour no-holds-barred bare-knuckles soul-baring, he told me, for the first time,

                                                    "I love you."

Eight months after he'd dumped me.

(???)

He then said, "I'll always have your back."

After which he promptly disappeared from my life again. In the past six months, we've seen each other....once.

C'est la vie, c'est la guerre....

December 2012: Lost the other dog--the one my ex-husband and I had gotten as a puppy and had had for fourteen years, a once-in-a-lifetime dog whose loss will forever leave a hole in my heart.
Oh, did I mention that this happened on Christmas morning?

January 2013: Sure enough, got jerked around yet again, and was not offered a full-time job. Initial offer: one concert. Not even an opera...a concert. From a sixty thousand dollar contract last year to a six-HUNDRED-dollar offer this year. (I should like to point out here that there has been no appreciable change in my vocal production in this time.) Needless to say, in the most professional way I was capable of, I told them to go pound sand.

February 2013: They came back with another offer...the concert...plus ONE opera. (Apparently someone else had turned down the initial offer--I was not the only one sending out sand-pounding orders.) Yet again, I reminded them where a good quantity of sand could be found, and what they could do with same, forthwith.
I hadn't been holding my breath for the same situation as last year--the chances of another mezzo colleague's needing to take a last-minute leave, and THEN of that contract being offered to me, were laughable to nonexistent.

So.
Lost my partner.
Lost my dog.
Lost my job.

Now what?

Here's where it gets interesting. (Well, OK, at least to me.)

Back in January 2012, when I'd first refused my offer at the opera, I began to kick around the idea of writing again. I've mentioned in the past that one of my dreams was to be a writer, but I'd taken a 25-year detour in pursuing a music career instead. Well, OK, I had the time....and didn't want to sing anymore...and I had a couple of ideas to play with...so I did. I figured, "Well, if I'm gonna be broke, I might as well be broke and happy....right?" *shrugs*
One of the ideas started mutating (really, there's no other way to describe it) into something interesting, so I just kept jotting related ideas down until one day (about a week before the full-time offer, mais oui) I realized that I might...just might...have enough for a full-length book. A real book. Maybe even more than one book.  I had a storyline--a very rough one, but still a storyline--I liked. I had smaller ideas, little bits of dialogue or set design or exposition or character development, attaching themselves to my storyline like fleas on a barnyard cat--they were hopping around so fast I almost couldn't keep track of them all.  Even better, the little bits all fit together neatly and plausibly. I started feeling like Gene Wilder in 'Young Frankenstein'--wild-eyed, screaming "IT....COULD....WORK!!!!"

And then, the offer came in, and I had to put all that aside.

So. In January 2013....when my life went into free-fall....things were, on the surface, worse than they had been the year before. But, oddly, I felt free. There was nothing, no one, holding me back anymore...I could go anywhere, do anything, I wanted. I had my little savings socked away to keep me from panicking about money--it wasn't a huge amount, but enough to last me a few months while I sat with the question of what I wanted to do with my one wild and precious life. And, again and again, when I did sit with that question, the answer came back that, at least in the short term, I wanted to write.

And so I am.
I don't know if this is what I will end up doing with my life.
I don't know whether my writing is any good.
I don't know whether I'll ever get published.
I don't know if I'll ever make a dime from it.
It.
Doesn't.
Matter.

I'm free.

RM

I recently visited a friend in the hospital after a major surgery (she's doing fine, thanks for asking), and while there, I noticed that Stanford hospital has an extensive art collection in nearly every medium one could imagine fitting on a wall--oils, tapestries, lithographs, photographs, pen and ink, and woodblock prints, to name a few.
(It's really lovely. If you ever have some time, go peruse at your leisure. Just be aware that, although the hospital itself has no charge, it's not entirely free--you may have to pay for parking.)

As I was leaving the third floor elevator, I noticed, hanging on the wall directly opposite, a woodblock print called "Sky in Cora's Marsh" by Neil Welliver.  I was very taken by it--I'm a sucker for landscape prints, especially woodblock (my art jones is genetic, I swear)--and so, when I got home last night, I looked Welliver up on the internet. Fortunately, there's quite a bit of information on him available, as well as many images to give one an idea of his style and oeuvre.

Early in his career (between about 1960 and 1970-71) he did quite a bit of figurative painting, mainly female nudes set in nature, usually in a pond or river. In the paintings I looked at online, one was lying on her belly in the water, looking up languidly at the viewer, one was sitting on the banks of a creek, another standing in a river up to her thighs, unconcernedly taking a shirt off over her head. All of them seemed youngish, but not so young that they looked like children--I would have guessed them to be in their 20s or early 30s.

As I said before, I'm a landscape whore, but I found myself captivated mainly by Welliver's nudes, and for the longest time, I couldn't figure out why....I wasn't attracted to them nor did I get an erotic charge from them: the figures didn't appear in suggestive poses, but were very tranquil and calm-looking. There was nothing particularly out of the ordinary about them. They weren't what would be physically considered 'beautiful' by modern standards: they were fleshy. They had bellies and thick thighs. They had large rear ends. Instead of a daintily trimmed or waxed pubic area, they all displayed a thick dark patch between their thighs. Their breasts weren't large, or perfectly formed, or perky--they were small, or large, or pointed, or one went one way and one the other. They weren't idealized in any way that I could obviously make out.

So why was I so engrossed by these paintings? Why did I study them so intently?

Finally, I got it:

....they looked like me.

They looked like real women, not the twisted images put forward by the media as the only acceptable standard of beauty. Here was a respected artist--a man--saying, this is beauty. You are beautiful.

None of these women looked in any way uncomfortable with their bodies. What the hell has happened in the last forty years to make us believe otherwise?

I know this is not a new revelation--many many far more well-informed and intelligent people than I have been kicking and screaming about exactly this objectification of women's bodies in the media. But the "OH!!" moment came when I went beyond the intellectual to the personal.

I had never quite believed J (or any of my lovers) when he told me he thought I was beautiful. I never trusted it. I had suspected that, when he started dating someone else, it was obviously because he wanted to be with someone skinnier, and therefore automatically more attractive, than I was. I had deeply internalized that I was somehow less-than beautiful because of my body. It was as if I had compartmentalized myself into two discrete and totally separate pieces: my head, which encompassed my face, my hair, my skin, my brain, my intellect and wit--in short, anything I could see as being in any way acceptable and attractive; and my body, this awkward, lumpy, stretch-marked, scarred, hairy, FAT piece of flesh that was only there as a vehicle for my head. I'd never really seen how clearly that demarcation between the two parts of myself had been.

But.
What if--?
What if, when those men looked at me naked, they saw what I had seen when I looked at the women in Neil Welliver's paintings? --And, more to the point, really DID think I was beautiful?

To look through a man's eyes--and to be seen as attractive--opened MY eyes. How very deeply I had internalized my sense of UNattractiveness based solely on body image...of course, I had gotten all this on an intellectual level--the head had gotten the message--but it had never really filtered down to the part that needed to hear it most.

I hold no illusions that this is going to completely set me free from my negative self-image....but to be able to see my body type through a man's eyes--and in seeing, be told that what I am physically is attractive, is sexy, is beautiful--is huge.

Thank you, Neil Welliver, wherever you are.
RM

For reference, here's a link to a picture of "Sky in Cora's Marsh": http://www.neilwelliver.com/ex2000/prints/sky.htm
And here's a link to an extensive gallery of Welliver's work spanning most of his career, including several of his nudes:
http://alexandregallery.com/artists/worksAvailable/Neil-Welliver

The Forest For the Trees

I had the experience of giving my first recital this past week (I know, I know....it only took HOW long?). It was an education in many ways: I learned the hard way how much WORK it takes to put on a concert (I've produced a concert before but always as a collaborator, not as a principal) and how much energy and stamina it takes to sing an hours' worth of music.

By all accounts it was a smashing success, save one: my own.

I've never had such an experience where my perception of what had occurred was SO different, so diametrically opposed to what others related to me, even as a performer; I could always say "well, THAT piece didn't go so well, but THAT one was all right, yeah?" This time, however, I felt relentlessly negative about my efforts--I remember thinking that my throat was dry despite all the liquids I'd been drinking; I was nervous, which meant my breath support went out the window, requiring me to breathe in places I'd never meant to; my voice felt thick, wooden, not at all flexible or reliable (oh yeah, did I mention that because of the stress of doing a solo recital, I'd managed to get sick the week before and was singing on a cold?), and so I felt I oversang to compensate. You name it, I thought it--and the Inner Critic was relentless and vicious, critiquing the thinness of tone, the poor phrasing, the word flubs, the pitch issues in the Poulenc piece and the fact that I'd let the accompanists' tempo change from rehearsal to recital throw me off in it....all through the concert. By the end, all I wanted was to crawl under a rock (preferably with a cocktail or two) and never call myself a 'professional' again.

My friends and colleagues, on the other hand, were generous and unanimous in their praise. And I couldn't believe a word of it.

I spent a lot of time the next day thinking about that. How could my experience differ so profoundly from what the audience had experienced? I didn't want to think my friends were merely blowing smoke up my posterior when they praised me. Why couldn't I believe them? What was wrong with ME that I couldn't accept or trust the praise, and that I was so damn hard on myself that I couldn't find a single thing to praise for myself? Had all the internal work I'd done on my self-esteem gone for naught, blown out the window by a few flubbed words and missed entrances? Where did that self-loathing come from?

It took a conversation with a friend a few days later to help me realize what I had missed. I confessed to her my feelings about the concert and my bewilderment at my reaction compared to others'. She said to me,

"It's because you were in hyper-critical musician mode--you were looking at it from the standpoint of 'I'm not operating at 100% vocally, and can't sing as well as I know I could, so it's not gonna be any good!'

"--but what you didn't hear was that, whatever you felt you my have lacked vocally, you more than made up for in terms of connecting with the spirituality of the poetry and communicating that beauty to your audience."

I was taken aback. I hadn't considered this at all, having been so intensely focused on the technical aspects of the performance. But she was right--and that was the missing piece of the puzzle, the reason my audience had responded so enthusiastically and generously....it wasn't about technical perfection, and never had been. I think that for a lot of us singers, we do focus so intensely on the technical that we forget to connect with the emotional depths of what we're singing about. We're taught to get the rhythms and the pitches, but not about HOW to get the rhythms and the pitches so that our audience understands them too. We forget that it's as much about the words as the music, and that it's more important to connect than to impress.

The whole reason we sing is not to show off our proficiency, but to communicate--to share uniquely human, and universal, emotions in a way no other art form can quite match.

I am so grateful for my friends....for their support but also for their insight and help in allowing me the grace to see and accept what really happened last Wednesday night, and that I always have more to learn about what it means to be a singer.

I was so busy rearranging twigs on the forest floor that I forgot to look up and see the light coming through the branches.

RM

Messiaen, and a couple of rambling thoughts on why I do what I do

I attended my friend Jonathan Dimmock's organ recital of the Messiaen piece "La Nativite du Seigneur" last night, in the magnificent space of St. Ignatius' Catholic church (really, for architecture I prefer the neo-Gothic gorgeousness of St. Dominic's, but for sheer grandeur....wow. Just wow. And for the musically inclined among us, the acoustic in St. Ignatius can't be beat. But, as usual, I digress).

If you had asked me before I left why, exactly, I wanted to hear this concert, I couldn't give you a compelling answer. I'm not a Messiaen fanatic (I've sung "St. Francois D'Assise", and five hours of Messiaen is about as much as anyone should ever have to endure in one go, thankyouverymuch), although I like his creative energy. It's not that I was sick with a sinus infection and had a bit of cabin fever (although I did). It's not even a piece I'd go out of my way to hear again. The movements were performed perfectly, in a supremely suitable environment, but I've had many an opportunity to hear similar musical offerings in similar environments.

I realized, about two-thirds of the way through the hour (despite its being nine discrete movements, it only takes about 55-60 minutes to perform the entire piece), why, in fact, I wanted to hear Jonathan play it--because I had read an interview with him in SF Classical Voice in which he described the experience of playing the Messiaen, in almost ecstatic terms:

"By the time I get to the end, to those last chords, I am moving out of my body, my skin can't hold the dimensions of the music, it's as if my fingers are exploding. It's then that I feel like a channel rather than a performer. I realize it's not about me."

The real reason I was there was to see WHY Jonathan was so passionate about it. I wanted to see what it felt like--to have that almost out-of-body experience while performing--since I so rarely felt that moved by my own performing; and never, to my recollection, as a soloist--I've always felt my 'peak' moments came within the context of a group. I've never felt that sense of transcendence as a solo artist--I think it's because my performance anxiety precludes that.

The times I've felt most lifted, most alive, were when a group with whom I was singing did everything 'right': moved, breathed, thought as one entity. The most magical moments for me came out of the symbiosis, where one is part of a larger whole, integral but not individual.

It's the same thrill I get when watching the Blue Angels perform their aerial acrobatics, or a synchronized swimming team at the Olympics--the ability to put one's individuality aside for the good of the whole, and the generosity inherent in that precision of agreed-upon mutual movement. One plane alone, one swimmer alone, just isn't as exciting or interesting to watch, no matter how beautifully executed the routine may be. It's seeing two or more people, doing the exact same thing, in perfect sync--in perfect harmony, really--with each other, that makes us gasp.

It occurred to me then that that's why I've never really been a 'solo' artist--at least, not a very successful one....in that sense. I feel too naked, too unsupported. Don't get me wrong, I enjoy singing solos when I get them--but performing solos in front of an audience isn't the point for me: I honestly don't care much for that. For me, the validation comes from being Alpha dog for those few measures--first among equals. That's when my ego fluffs with pride. And that's enough for me--I can meld in with the rest of the pack, after that.

So, when I look at my 'career' from THAT angle--that of being respected among my peers (if the generous feedback from them, all of whom are soloist-worthy in their own rights, are any indication!)--I can consider myself pretty successful, after all.

RM