I have a cold. Of course, it's coming up to Christmas.
To be precise I'm suffering from a cold's aftermath. A chesty cough, with origins that go back eighty years to my home town where fumes from open coal fires (romanticised these days) corrupted my breathing apparatus. If I'm unlucky the cough will last two months.
What is a chesty cough? It generates viscous fluid - barely fluid in fact - which... No! Stay my creative mind, this is not festive talk. Less controversially I am intimately aware of the shape of my trachea, tubes that feed my lungs with air. Sensations within my chest identify that upside-down Y and its state of siege.
At singing lesson yesterday, as V and I were anatomising the song, I Will Give My Love an Apple, I recognised composing genius: a passage which achieves poignancy by repeating one note seven times consecutively, the exception being the fourth note:
...love a pa - a – lace where – in...
di – di – di - dah – di - di - di
But here’s the trick. If you’re a beginner (like me) deep-seated memories of simple do-re-mi scales, learned by rote in primary school, will encourage you to sing this differently, more predictably. You won’t be breaking musical rules but the result will be banal (= so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring).
Return to the score (Trad. arr. Herbert Howells) and sing what was written. It isn’t immediately intuitive but done properly it sounds, well, lyrical.
The line demands rigorous breath control. I sang it, ran out of puff. And again. Managed it but was overtaken by coughing. V said, “That was fine.” I protested. V shrugged and said, “You sang it.”
I, too, have a cold such as you describe, RR. The result, no doubt, of going cycling last Sunday morning surrounded by freezing fog (the photographing opportunities were wonderful, with everywhere coated with frozen tinsel and views emerging through the mist).
ReplyDeleteNevertheless, I paid for it (although I hope it will not last 2 months as is your experience) because I don't work up a sweat riding an ebike and consequently get chilled sooner than of yore.
I do hope you were not spreading your germs around at your singing lesson, or your teacher will not be thanking you this Christmas.
Avus: Twasn't a cold but the aftermath of a cold. I doubt it was infectious. The aim was to say something original about this affliction, or to allude to it in an original style. There was in any case a humdrum sequel: as on previous occasions (following medical advice) I managed to squeeze a course of antibiotics out of the GP and am hoping for a rather more tranquil Christmas as a result. As to V I needed to deliver her Christmas present - a bottle of Bolly. None of these facts being worth a post.
ReplyDelete