Musings on Conducting, Singing, Time and Physics!

Blessings Journal 31st October 2011

Blessings, gratitudes, thanks, gladness, joy :o

I conducted my first choir rehearsal today :-) in 6 or 7 years :-)

The great thing was, despite having done hardly any prep work, nor done much conducting in the past 7 years, nor singing either, I am better now than I was back then.

The brain really does learn for you, in the background, when you're not focusing on things.

And like riding a bike, you never forget. Sensory memory is amazing :-)

Time is amazing.

Time, like molecules, can pass at so many different speeds yet regardless of the speed, and regardless of how long it is since you last did something, if you have no trauma or emotional issues surrounding an area or feel loved and supported, or the time is right in some other way, it really can seem as if it were only yesterday that you last did something. It can all flood back with no trouble. I can put down a piece of music for ten years and come back to it with even greater clarity and understanding.

I can worry to death about a person daily, causing stress in the relationship, yet I can also not see or even contact a friend for years and then pick up the phone and, like stepping straight back in time to my youth, it's as if we never parted. All the old feelings, the conversation, still there.

Time also teaches you transferable skills - during pregnancy my voice flourished, I feel, because pregnancy made me feel confident, full, complete, womanly, mature. And my voice became so as a result.

Also I psychologically expected my voice to become mature and full during pregnancy owing to others' reports eg. Renée Fleming, so maybe because I expected my voice to be full, it became full.  (In the way that owing to negative media portrayal, many expect childbirth to be horrific or painful, so it becomes so for them because they need to raise their expectations, try pleasurable birth techniques etc).

To the contrary, people told me my voice couldn't sound full until I was in my late twenties, that if it did appear to sound full I must be faking it - I must be covering or using false vocal folds. So I didn't use the full sound when I was younger, believing it to be false. Yet at conservatoire, during certain coaching sessions, it just came out. In an environment where I had no pressure, criticism, I was allowed to sing naturally how I wanted, the full warm sound came out. Usually, it came out in response to certain repertoire: I just HAD to use it for Chausson's La caravane - what a gorgeous, dramatic song!

So when I was pregnant, I finally felt like I had the right to use this sound! The right to finally sing Puccini (I will never sing Wagner though).

How much was psychological, how much physiological?...

I got a bit power crazy though and developed a wobble! Also when I was feeling low, I often tended to wobble.

So these days I only use the wobble for a joke. I've gone back to pure, early music, early music or sacred chamber group sounds and I'm really enjoying it as a nice refreshing break. The cleanness, the line, the phrasing, the pure pitch.

Perhaps it is even my niche and if I were to have a niche in the classical world, I am happy to settle with Bach, Mozart, Dowland, Purcell and Handel. I really want to extend my Bach and Handel repertoire :-)

I indulge in light to full vibrato in solo repertoire, and I love to sing other things like Mariah Carey, Muse, etc. :-)