Moving on, perhaps sideways

Who's this effeminate guy? He lived in the 1600s before streaming
was invented. Or the electric guitar. Did music of a sort. A loser, then

Just imagine that our present way of reading books (silently, to ourselves) never happened. That, instead, books are only read aloud: to groups, a friend, to an empty room, to a recording machine. And that our orations are made public:

“X’s pernickety accent suits Mansfield Park.”

“Hey, Y does all the voices in As You Like It.”

“Z’s Great Gatsby still isn’t right, a New Yorker’s giving him lessons.”

No skipping, no lies about finishing Moby Dick. Proof would be unmistakable.

Welcome to my world, in a sense.

Aged 14 in 1949, with the publication of Orwell’s 1984, I started reading seriously, voraciously but haphazardly. Huge unforgivable gaps appeared and widened (Latin and Greek literature, most fantasies, Dostoevski, short stories, virtually all poetry, philosophy) but eventually other milestones were passed (Already blogged; I won’t bore you). A process that started dwindling two years ago and is now at a standstill.

That same seriousness and voraciousness, minus the randomness, is being applied to singing. I’ve moved into an oral world resembling the imaginary one above. This world is transient and requires certain disciplines. A soi-disant intellectual recently admitted ignoring the battle scenes in War and Peace - converting it into Blank and Peace, I suppose. There’s none of that in An die Musik.

In rectifying mistakes I am made aware of the composer’s genius. I am more conscious of my body because I have to be. I need tutoring because there’s another language - musical notation - involved. Singing is not superior to book-reading but it’s less casual. Visceral reactions occur more frequently. Perhaps delusionally, I am fulfilled.

 

Here’s Purcell’s An Evening Hymn, written in the seventeenth century. My present task but pitched lower.