Yay! After postponing a couple of times due to my family emergency followed by a cold that temporarily messed up my voice, I finally made it to voice lesson #2. We did some vocalises, and also worked on “Lasciatemi morire” by Monteverdi.
I’m beginning to get a glimpse of how challenging it will be to study voice! After 15+ years of singing experience, I thought I would be (or at least feel) more prepared than I am. But it turns out I still have some old habits to break, and new ones to form. I’m looking forward to the challenge, though.
I felt like my performance of “Lasciatemi morire” was kind of crappy. It’s partly because my teacher gave me four new things to incorporate into my technique that run against the grain of my current singing habits. It puts my performance off-kilter because of course I can’t master the new stuff 10 minutes after it’s introduced. (Which is what practice time is for.) The other thing is that I have a great deal of respect for my teacher, which actually makes me nervous and slightly intimidated to sing in front of him by myself. I’m sure I’ll get over the nerves eventually. In the meantime, thank god for patient voice teachers who can listen to crappy singing and yet still recognize any potential one may have and understand that improvement will come with time, practice, and patience.
1 comment:
"..thank god for patient voice teachers who can listen to crappy singing.." Hmm. Reminds me of Hermann Hesse's Harry Haller and his conversation with Mozart in the 1927 novel, Steppenwolf. Harry, the purist, adores Mozart, but loathes 20th Century technology, such as phonographs, radio, etc, which convey music in an imperfect rendition of the original performance. In the final part of the book, Mozart, acting as a sort of radio announcer introducing a Handel's Concerto Grosso in F Major, brings Haller to task and reveals that the radio "cannot destroy the original spirit of the music...a Handel who, disfugured by radio,is ... still divine."
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