Words that sing

(Click here for a recording that goes with this poem)

A garden of sweet strings softly lit by
The warmth of flute and clarinet
Rises into the air, inviting my entry,
Into flowing landscapes of sound

And now I hear those notes that are
For me a cue to prepare my body
To take in air - every inch of my torso,
A balloon whose walls are poised muscle.

Smooth inevitability of the passing bars
Leave me no choice but to join the dance
And suddenly the internal space of my head
Is throbbing with sound – my voice lives.

Who am I? A mournful abandoned lover
Every emotion raised to operatic intensity
By the magnificence of the pouring harmonies
That awaken powerful echoes in my heart.

The endless lines must flow unimpeded
By self-doubt or adjustment. I try to float
And trust that the sound will ride secure
On the smooth strength of the tensing muscles.

Suddenly a change of key brings out the sun
Rushes optimism through every bar
The heart beats faster as if obeying
The quickened pulse of the conductor’s arm.

A new challenge now – cascades of notes
Too fast to think, or fear mistakes
Just following, setting the voice free to fly
And soar above the racing orchestra.

Now tension builds towards the climax
My breathing deep, my throat relaxing
To soar above the frozen orchestra
And plummet down to the final note.

Responding to a prompt at one single impression to write about melody, I thought I would try my hand at a poem that trys to capture a singer’s perspective of singing one of my favourite arias - Bellini’s Qui la voce sua soave from I Puritani.

To make this a multimedia experience, I’ve added a recording of me singing the aria I had in mind. It was recorded at home on my computer so it’s neither great quality sound nor my best quality singing - but I thought it would give you an idea of what the experience I’m describing sounds like from the outside.

Click here to listen to a recording I made recently

Pisen Rusalky O Mesiku (Song of the Moon), Rusalka’s aria from Rusalka

Mesiku na nebi hlubokem…………O moon, high in the heavens
Svetlo tvé daleko vidi,………………Your light sees far,
Po svete bloudis sirokém………….You travel around the wide world
Divas se v pribytky lidi…………….Gazing into human dwellings

Mesicku, postuj chvili ……………. O, moon, stand still a while
reckni mi, kde je muj mily………..Tell me, where is my love?

Rekni mu, stribmy mesicku,……..Tell him, silvery moon
me ze jej objima rame,……………..That I embrace him tightly,
aby si alespon chvilicku……………That he should for at least a while
vzpomenul ve sneni na mne………Remember his dreams!

Zasvet mu do daleka,……………….Shine on him, wherever he is
rekni mu, kdo tu nan ceka!………Tell him I am here waiting!

O mneli duse lidska sni,……………If he is dreaming of me,
at’se tou vzpominkou vzbudi!…..Awaken his memories
Mesicku, nezhasni, nezhasni!……O, moon, don’t disappear!

There’s a school of thought that says we should never let go of any of our dreams, but always continue to give them everything. That our failure or success in different fields is entirely determined by our commitment to that dream, by our belief that it will happen. That if we for some reasons stop dedicating ourselves to a dream, we will end up living a half-life that we will always regret.

I’m starting to think it’s more complex than that. A life lived without dreams would be sad, indeed, but as we grow and change, our dreams sometimes change. As our dreams contact reality, we learn more about them… and perhaps we discover we’re not so well suited to them as we thought. We may also find new things to dream about. So there come times when we have to reshape our dreams, or indeed let go of old dreams and find new ones…

(As I write this, I wonder - is this all really true, or am I just trying to reconcile myself to letting go of something that has been a cherished hope for so many years? I think it’s more than that, but it’s an important question.)

I’m at that stage with my dreams of singing professionally. There is no doubt in my mind that singing will always be part of my life. I had often thought of doing it professionally, in order to be able to dedicate my time to improving my skills and to have the opportunity to perform at a high level, but things never quite seemed to work out. Just over a year ago, inspired by the attitude I’ve described above, I decided that if I didn’t really give it a try, I would always regret it. And in trying to raise my game, I learnt a lot about myself.

Importantly, I think I’ve learnt that my joy in singing is very vulnerable to the fierce competition inherent in singing professionally… I love singing in concerts, where all I am asked to do is to give pleasure to my audience, and I delight in the post-concert comments which tell me that they have indeed enjoyed my singing. But doing auditions are so different, not least because success is rare and feedback is even rarer. And I can imagine that the pressure of having to make money would just exacerbate that.

Singing is very personal to me - when I sing there’s a sense in which I open the voice of my soul to my audience. And, as I found after the break-up, my personal emotions are closely entwined with my singing. I suppose if I went for it professionally, I would toughen myself up, learn a greater emotional distance.. but I’m not sure I want to.

I must also recognise that, at 31, it is in many ways too late for me to take the standard routes into professional singing. So much of that journey seems to depend on having the luck to be in the right place at the right time. And for various reasons, I just wasn’t.

Deep down, I also feel, rightly or wrongly, that I don’t have the steely discipline needed to really get to the bottom of my technique. To really hammer into my vocal and mental musculature the consistency that I would need to get to the top. There are a lot of reasons for that - I’m very much a person who lives in her head rather than her body, and that kind of athletic repetition doesn’t come naturally. I like to try different things each time… Also my expectations get in the way of my achievement, as I’ve discussed before.

Maybe there are people who only have one dream throughout their lives… for them to let go of that dream would be a real loss. But I have always been someone who has had a lot of different dreams.

One question people are asked, when trying to find the dream they should pursue, is “what did you dream of being when you were really young.” I know the answer very well - it was writing, not singing, that I dreamed of as a child. Not that I didn’t sing, too, but the stories and poems I wrote were an even deeper part of my identity. I don’t remember when I started really writing… but I know I tried (independently of my parents!) to send a story to a publisher at the tender age of 9, and that certainly wasn’t the first thing I’d written.

At sixteen, having written 3 fantasy novels of over 50,000 words each, I stopped writing. I realised that the stories we tell express what we know and believe about the world, and that I didn’t know enough. At the time I thought that I needed to move from writing fantasy to writing about reality, and that the big blockage was my lack of experience. Actually I’m still drawn to writing fantasy - the freedom it gives you to create a world in which you can give expression to so many thoughts that would be harder to communicate otherwise. And I think the effort of creating a completely new world often says much more about your views of how things work, or should work, than a story set in the “real” world.

In the months when I was too choked up to sing, I rediscovered writing again. And found in it a source of healing and expression that has been very precious to me. So much so, that I haven’t missed not being able to sing anything like as much as I would have expected. An important difference, for me, was that writing gave me the opportunity to do things my way.

Now I am working on rediscovering my singing, because it gives pleasure to me and others. And I am also exploring songwriting, too. Singing will, as I say, always be part of my life.

But I have a feeling that the new dream that I want to start to dream will involve writing. So perhaps the title of this post should have read “dreaming old dreams again”!

(The youtube clip (with a great slideshow!) is of an Argentinan folksong called Sapo Cancionero, a song about a toad that is in love with the moon, with the eternal madness of all poets. The refrain means: Singing toad, sing your song - how sad life is if we live it without a dream to aspire to!)

Another recording… this time an aria from la Boheme (Donde lieta)

To the place she left so happily to respond to your call of love
Mimi returns alone to her solitary nest.
She goes back to embroidering pretend flowers
Goodbye without resentment.

Listen, listen
Gather together all the little things I left lying around
In my drawer is the gold band and the prayerbook.
Wrap it all in a cloth and I’ll send the porter.

But look now! Under that pair of gloves
Is the pink bonnet you bought me on the day we fell in love
If you want…. if you want…
If you want then keep it as a reminder of our love
Goodbye. Goodbye… without resentment.

Strangely this was a song that I never found too emotionally powerful to sing, even though it has a very personal resonance for me. I too tried to let my ex go free by suggesting that we should exchange keys and the other possessions we had left at each other’s flat - he reacted with a very bizarre self-protective anger! I don’t think he understood at all what I was trying to say…. as in the last line of the aria: addio, senza rancor! I was too hurt and sad to say it as clearly as I would have liked to, but that only partly accounts for his misinterpretation.

Perhaps the message of letting someone go in peace is such a strong idea that, unlike other songs I was trying to sing at the time, it strengthened rather than upset me. It’s a lovely aria, anyway - I’ve only just started really working on it so I don’t quite do it justice yet, but it’s so satisfying to sing.

Singing is one of those things that seems to work best if you don’t try to control it too hard.

I’ve been using recording quite a lot as a tool lately - it’s really helpful to be able to make instant recordings of a particular phrase, then keep trying different takes until I get a sound that I’m happier with. Sometimes I get demoralised by the sounds I’m producing… but it’s great to be able just to rerecord and find that OK, maybe I didn’t get my best sound first time, but I can try to fix the problem, and make a real difference.

Often getting the sound I want, counterintuitively, seems to involve forgetting what I want it to sound like! Some things - like for example trying to enunciate clearly, do require concentration and focus. (I’m often shocked to realise I just can’t hear some consonants at all on the recording… when I was sure I was pronouncing them first time round!)

But the actual sound quality… that seems to require a very different attitude. To give you an example, here’s a clip of me trying to make a nice sound and here’s a clip of me letting the sound come out without trying to shape it. The first is plummier, wobblier and duller - the second has a slightly unvarnished quality but it’s a much more alive sound.

The trick is to know the few things that I need to do to set up the right conditions - and trust my voice to do the rest without my interference. A challenge, but an enjoyable one.

Click here to listen to this recording

I’ll not complain, even though my heart is breaking.
Love forever lost to me, I’ll not complain.
Although you shine with the brilliance of a diamond,
No light relieves the darkness of your heart:
I feel as if I’ve always known it.
I’ll not complain, even though my heart is breaking:
I saw you in a dream,
I saw the darkness inside you,
I saw the snake that devours your heart,
I saw, my love, how very miserable you are!
I’ll not complain, I’ll not complain.

(Ich grolle nicht, from Schumann’s Dichterliebe)

I’ve finally mastered the technology to post recordings of my singing on this blog (well, almost - I could do with a proper microphone!). And it seemed appropriate to start with this song, which captures the mixture of pain and compassion that I feel towards my ex. The fact that I can now sing this without choking up shows just how far I’ve come in the healing process. Hope you enjoy it…

I’m getting back to doing real singing practice again after a fairly long hiatus, and it’s throwing up some interesting challenges.

I recently commented on a poll over at readwritepoem, comparing the pleasure and naturalness of my experience of singing and of writing poetry:

The difference is the expectations I place on myself. Poetry I write for myself, principally, and thus it gives me great pleasure. Singing had become something I did for others and so it became an effort. Hard to judge whether my poetry gives others as much pleasure as my singing - but I feel it certainly achieves more pleasure in others at a cost of much less pain to me - that’s what I mean by it coming easily.

I’m working my way back to singing naturally and easily too - but it’s a slow process once you’ve lost that sense of freedom and ease.

I think I’ve done less singing in the last six months than any other time in my life. Which was partly a combination of emotional fallout from the breakup and the challenges of moving to a new job and a new country. But I think more importantly it’s been to do with the pressure I put on my singing in an attempt to become a professional singer. The high standards I set myself. And the blows to my confidence of receiving a succession of rejections - including rejections from courses and companies working at an amateur level. Anyway, with all of this I lost the confidence in my own ability to sing.

For a while, I just floundered, feeling I was betraying myself by not pursuing this dream that had been part of me, yet finally realising that there was no way I could pursue that dream at that time. I had to give myself space. At the same time, I was rediscovering writing, which felt like a far more natural and personal way of expressing myself, without the pressures of singing. I even started writing my own songs, which is a fascinating and satisfying process.

Now I think it’s time I started reclaiming my voice, and my singing. Recovering the joy and the naturalness - while at the same time not being lazy about technique. I have learnt a lot over recent years about finding my natural voice and trusting it to sing. My expectations got in the way there - I kept trying to produce the sound a particular way, rather than doing some basic things that free the voice to express its full resonance and communicative potential.

But it’s hard. Expectations get in the way of everything, but without expectations you don’t get anywhere. It’s a zen-like paradox! Somehow I must find the middle way in my singing. Wish me luck!

As I said in an earlier post, my close friends (you know who you are!) were absolutely vital for me in dealing with the break-up. As one of them said, sometimes it’s utterly crucial to have people whom you can turn to and ask for an outside opinion:

“I know I’d get really lost without outside neutral (insofar as friends can be) witnesses if I were in your position. Sometimes it all sounds so crazy you wonder if you’re the one who’s the nutter. But let me reassure you, you are not a nutter!”

When you lose your own anchoring self-esteem in the face of a storm of personal criticism, it is so useful to be able to raft up with someone who knows you well enough to be able to say with confidence that the criticism is wrong. For example, my ex said that I was too dependent on him - he seemed to take the view that any reliance on other people was a weakness. And for a while I almost believed this was true. So it was an incredible comfort to read this:

“From having been your friend for the last 14 years (!) I would say the biggest change I have noticed in you is the development of your ability to rely on others, and to talk to others when you have problems, rather than keep it all inside as you did.  I see that as a sign of huge strength, to be able to talk to others, to hear what they say and to make yourself vulnerable by opening up to the possibility of rejection. 

As the months have passed I have regained my strength, my confidence, and enough anger to protect myself and define my own boundaries. But there were a few months where I really did need support, and I am profoundly grateful to my friends for the way they helped me through that time.

So for them, I have written this - another text for the series “Songs to heal a broken heart” (see earlier posts here).

The hugs, the tea, the sympathy
The warmth, the anger for me,
The insights and the confidence
These gifts my friends give to me.

I long to see my lover
And my heart is slow to mend -
But my life is far from empty
While I have the love of my friends

The certainty of long familiarity
A faith that is not blind,
The tissues, the food, the company -
My friends are wise and kind

I long to see my lover…

The comfort and the distractions
The patience and the time
The wisdom and the sharing
I receive from these friends of mine

I long to see my lover…

Photo: friendship can never be measured…, originally uploaded by rAmmoRRison.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/sugar-bliss/409158249/

Reading recent posts, it occurs to me that regular readers of this blog could be forgiven for think that I am still obsessed with my ex and having real difficulty moving on. Which is strange for me, because my life is very full with other things, and there are days when I don’t think about him at all. And yet somehow most of the entries on this blog are in some way related to our relationship. Even when given different and challenging prompts for poems, somehow the same story seems to keep recurring… I think there are two reasons for this.

Firstly, one of my original reasons for starting to write, and starting to write this blog specifically, was to give myself the opportunity to express the feelings that, because of his silence, I had been unable to express to him. Somehow to be able to express these feelings publicly and permanently has had a really healing effect - probably much more effective than expressing them to him would have been! This blog is the place where I express my thoughts about this relationship. In many posts, I have expressed some pain, or anger, or fear, and in the process taken another step towards healing it. They’re not painful emotions any more. But if I didn’t write about these things, I would be denying emotions that are part of my journey.

But I think there’s a more important reason.  What I have experienced in the last year has been an intense and powerful personal version of a universal human story. And like so many poets and writers and singers before me, it seems a neverending source of inspiration for creativity. (Judging by page views and comments, people also seem to be most interested in my posts about this relationship, which again says something.)

And I also hope that what I write can be helpful and inspiring for others. I am so vividly aware of how much I have learnt from this relationship and its painful ending, and how much stronger I am as a result of what I have been through. I hope that through my writing, and my songwriting, I can reach out to people and encourage them to see just how brilliant the light at the end of their own dark tunnels can be. 

I’m constantly amazed by the way in which the breakup, though deeply painful, has strengthened me and given me a stronger grasp on who I am. It’s a theme that runs through this blog, eg. taking a risk, masks and fears, or, on a more poetic level phoenix tears and heartsong.

This song text, another one for the set of songs I plan to call songs to heal a broken heart, tries to capture that feeling - anger and hurt mixed with a genuine gratitude and sense of strength.

I wrote two versions of this one. I think the second one works better as a poem but the first one will be the better song - what do you think?

The eye of the paradox- version 1

How can doubt give rise to trust?
Or rejection kindle love?
Silence free a voice to speak?
Or dishonesty disclose the truth?

Searching outside for the answers, I was simply walking blind
Not knowing that the replies that I needed were all inside my mind.

At first your doubt destroyed my trust
Your rejection broke my heart
The silence you wanted stifled me
Your dishonesty broke my truth

And in searching outside for the answers, I was simply walking blind
Until at last I began to seek for the answers inside my own mind.

Your doubt taught me to trust myself
Your rejection, how to love
Your silence helped me find my voice
Your dishonesty revealed my truth

No more searching outside for the answers, no more walking lost and blind
For all the replies that I needed were there inside my mind.

Now I thank you for your doubt
I’m glad you rejected me
Now I’m grateful for your silence
And the deception that set me free

No more searching outside for the answers, no more walking lost and blind
I have all the answers that I need, safe in my own mind.

The eye of the paradox - version 2

In the face of your doubt
I quailed, and then…
I learnt to trust myself

In the face of your rejection
I wept, and then…
I learnt to love myself

In the face of your silence
I was stifled, and then…
I found my own voice

In the face of your weakness
I foundered, and then…
I found my own strength

In the face of your dishonesty
I doubted myself, and then…
I found my own truth

Photo - You have to face the Truth, originally uploaded by Vesuviano - Nicola De Pisapia.