June madness

With each passing day I don’t write on my blog, I have the impression that when I do post an entry, it will have to be more momentous than if I had posted it a day earlier. By the end of a week, it seems nothing less than the next definitive (Franco-)American novel will do, or at the very least, something to outshine A Year in Provence and its sequels. This is a slippery slope, as it means that each day, I will be less likely to actually do something about the blank blog page. Music is like this, too, I find. If you don’t practice for a few days, you know that it’s going to be harder when you do, so you unconsciously put it off for another day. Before you know it, weeks have gone by and you haven’t played, sung, etc.

So I have decided to meet the problem head on and get back to that unstable equilibrium that is the artist’s lot (if I may use that term to describe myself). Just, please – don’t expect anything momentous.

Last weekend was an action-packed weekend in an action-packed month, and I need to explain why to my non-French readers. In France, the year ends in June, especially if you have children or take part in any extra-professional activities. All the end-of-year school performances, parties, ceremonies, etc. take place in June. If you belong to a community group or activity (la vie associative, as it’s called here), the chances are the season ends in June. I suppose the phenomenon exists in the US (and other countries) too, but it seems more acute here. People virtually get together to say goodbye, before scattering like a treefull of starlings after a loud bang! If you were to spend a summer in France without ever going to the seashore, you’d think France hibernates, which would be a semantic contradiction, but I digress. (If you do go to the shore during this hypothetical summer, you will see more bare breasts than most American men see in a lifetime, but again, I digress.)

Friday was the fête de l’école, the end-of-year festival at B.’s and D.’s school. The theme was dance though the centuries, and I got to see B do a lovely waltz with one of the girls in his class. B’s parents were far more charmed by this than B was.

The highlight of the weekend was a concert on Saturday evening given by our rabbi and two female opera singers who are members of the congregation. They sang songs in Yiddish, Ladino and Hebrew, accompanied either by a piano or a guitar, and it was glorious. Now you would think that an event like this would draw hundreds (dare I say thousands?) of people. It didn’t; there were around 130 people in the audience. Once you know the type of congregation and the state of Judaism in general in France, it is no longer surprising. The congregation is libérale, a flavor halfway between American conservative and reform Judaism. There are a few libérale synagogues in France, about one in every major city, plus two or three in Paris. The other 95% of French synagogues are squarely in what would be called the “orthodox” category in America. The 95% don’t officially recognize the 5%, and so they refused to do any advertising for the concert. Even the Jewish radio station in Lyon refused to air an announcement about it. We also added a little self-flagellation: the concert started before the end of Shabbat on Saturday evening, not a good way to make friends with a religious, observant community. Future concerts, I am told – stay tuned! more to come! – will not conflict with the Sabbath.

On Sunday, B., D. and I did a 2-hour horse ride at La Ferme de la Dame Blanche, a riding club near the foothills of the Monts du Lyonnais, outside Lyon. This was their last Sunday ride of the season, and it conflicted with the fête du poney club at the club where D. has been taking lessons. But the Sunday ride at La Dame Blanche was his first opportunity to ride outside an arena without someone holding his pony. Both he and his Dad were very proud. The four 8-11 year-old girls on the ride, however (why does every riding club has a bevy of 8-11 year-old girls?), were disappointed we didn’t gallop. The scenery was stunning, the temperature was in the nineties (°F), and I would have worn my cowboy hat to protect me from the sun, but they (the ride leader and B. and D.) insisted I wear a helmet.

Yesterday was the fête de la musique. Throughout France on June 21, the longest day of the year, amateur and professional musicians give free concerts in the street and in concert halls. So did my singing group, but that’s a topic for another post ….

Solo!

I did it. And I survived. I sang solo for the first time in my life on stage. What’s more, nothing terrible happened. Actually, as I mentioned in my previous post, it wasn’t a complete solo; it was a duet. But we each sang certain parts individually.

Let me explain how all this came about. For the past five years or so, ever since the chorus in my son B.’s primary school issed a call for adult male voices to “fill the bottom in”, I have been doing choral singing, the past three years with a bona fide adult chorus, singing mostly popular French songs from the 1960s to the present.

This year I decided to supplement that with some individual voice training. There are about ten of us in the workshop, ranging in age from 17 to mid-50s. The range of experience is equally broad (the 17-year-old has had the most voice training). In the first class we each sang a song individually. That was difficult. Stripping naked in front of nine other people would not have been more difficult. But our instructor, J.B., said something very interesting – and encouraging. He said he has almost never met anyone who “can’t sing”, but that in France, people are very self-conscious about singing. He said that in Ireland, for example, singing is a natural part of life. (An Irishman living in France, who reads this blog from time to time, says he almost got kicked out of a concert in Corsica for singing along, so I guess that counts as confirmation.)

Once we got over the hurdle of that first strip scene, momentum began to build. We started concentrating on how to improve our techinque, how to be convincing, how to detach ourselves from the singer who made our chosen song famous (the songs are not our original compositions), how to sing with feeling, how to control our abdominal muscles, etc. J.B. pointed out other little problems along the way, in a way that makes us realize that every budding singer experiences them. He helped us to understand that the problems are not an indication that we “don’t know how to sing”, just that we haven’t learned a particular technique as well as we need to if we are to improve.

Then J.B. gave us the opportunity, together with the participants in three other workshops he leads, to sing individually on stage for an audience of around 100 people (the house capacity). I was hesitant at first, but his description of the event, plus my theater experience convinced me it was possible.

Last Friday, we arrived at 6pm for an 8:30 concert so that we could rehearse with the musicians accompanying us. This was the only rehearsal we had with them. The first thing my duet partner, F. and I noticed was the (high!) quality of the other singers. Here is a brief succession of thoughts: These people are all virtually professionals. I’m out of my depth after all. I’m going to get up there and my voice will crack or I’ll sing flat or I’ll forget lyrics or I’ll come in too soon, or too late.

Most of this happened during our allotted five minutes of dress rehearsal time. So we went off into a corner to rehearse some more. Among other things, we decided to modify the first and second voices, look at each other and forget about counting beats or measures. We would come in whenever we felt was the right moment, and let the (professional) musicians adapt to us. M., one of the other participants in our workshop, came with us into our corner, which was a big help.

Then the concert started. Every person who climbed onto the stage received a thunderous round of applause, largely from the other singers. Our nervous energy was finding an outlet. This was incredibly morale building and frightening at the same time. I’ve had stage fright before, but it was nothing like this. In the theater, if you’re not singing or dancing, you have leeway. So long as you stay in character, you can improvise. Even if someone you’re supposed to talk to misses an entrance, there’s usually some recourse if you think hard enough. In music, though, you haven’t even got the time to think. You’ve just got to just keep on going.

As I usually do in these situations, I started to feel time as an unstoppable force, like a freight train hurtling towards me. In the minutes that remained before our turn, I tried as hard as I could to supplant the feelings of inferiority with the will to put everything I had into my song, to sing as if my life depended on it. I think F. was doing the same thing.

When our time came, we went up there and sang Un Homme Heureux, by William Sheller, as if we had been doing it for years. Afterwards people spontaneously complemented us, saying they liked the interplay of our voices, they felt moved by the song and lots of other nice things.

Now I want more!

Theater memories

Concentration has never been my strong suit, and a typical day of translation work is peppered with internet searches for something urgent, such as an early 1950s-vintage Citroën Traction (more on that another time). That I am supposed to appear on stage and sing a song Friday in front of 100 or so strangers as part of my voice workshop is not helping me to concentrate (more on that in a few days if I survive). But it is making my daydreaming performance-oriented.

My last – and only – period of intense theater activity took place in high school, between the ages of 15 and 17. As this was Long Island, NY in the 1970s, the repertoire was the American musical comedies of the 1940s and 1950s (you have to please the parents): South Pacific, Carousel, Kiss Me Kate, Bye Bye Birdie and others. The memory that pops into my head was from a summer production of Applause, the then-recent Broadway adaptation of the 1950 film All About Eve.

I rarely had a major role in these shows because they all required solo singing. Maybe that’s why I’m doing a voice workshop now, though it’s a wee bit late. So I was usually in the chorus, which required singing, but no solos. My friend L., however, landed a minor role in Applause. It was minor compared to the major roles, but it was major compared to the chorus. This status got L. access to the “stars” dressing room. He liked that. To stoke my jealousy, he described the scene. Among other things, the stars often had to make elaborate costume changes at lightning speed, and there wasn't enough space for privacy. He liked that, too. Would I like to see for myself, he magnanimously offered.

A few days later, during one of the dress rehearsals, L. and I wandered into the “stars” dressing room, deep in conversation (on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, if I remember correctly), as nonchalantly as we could manage. Sure enough, there was F., who played the leading role of Margo Channing, her top half bereft of all clothing, her face attended by a make-up artist, her look generally fretful. Satisfied, L. suggested we continue our conversation (by now we had moved on to Much Ado about Nothing) elsewhere, as it was noisy in the “stars” dressing room.

During one of the performances a few days later, I took advantage of a few scenes in which I didn’t have any entrances to watch the play from the wings. After a few minutes, N., playing Eve Harrington, the other leading female role, appeared, looked around anxiously and asked me, could I hold this dress for her please. She then made her entrance in the next scene. A few minutes later F. appeared.

“What are you doing here?” It was all she could do to keep her voice a whisper.
“I’m watching the show.”
“What are you doing with that dress?”
“N. asked me to hold it for her.”
“Give me that. You just want to see N’s tits.”

Over the years, whenever this scene has wafted forward in time from its never-too-distant hiding place at the mouth of some cerebral cave, it has always been accompanied by the responses I could have offered, but didn’t.

Defensive: “But I was just standing here …”
Apologetic: “I really was rather boorish the other day, wasn't I?”
Wise guy: “Oh, is that why she asked me to hold it?”
Vicious: “Not to worry. If they’re anything like yours, I won’t be sticking around.”

Alas, never was a young face whiter, a young jaw slacker, young eyes wider and a young mind blanker than mine were that evening. I handed her the dress and fled.

On Friday I’ll be singing Un Homme Heureux (William Sheller) as part of a duet. Wish us luck!