Inevitably it’s about singing.
Most people sing, or at least make musical noises. La-las, whistling, humming, one repeated line from some dim song. Not me. I find myself murmuring stuff I've been taught. If from a recent lesson I may envisage the score and follow it in my mind's eye. Such swank! Non-singers will see this as stultifying, more like self-discipline than music-making.
They may have a point.
But that's only the start. Recognising I'm sub-consciously doing, say, Schumann, I stop. Take a deepish breath, consider the opening notes, remind myself of their difficulty (all openings are difficult), call up my proper singing voice from a point north of my bladder, re-start. Seriously.
I make an error. I stop, find the solution, re-start. Spontaneity is lost.
But what is gained? A sense of wholeness between my body (The parts that create sound; hands that sketch phrases; a bridge between consciousness and heartbeat which perceives rhythm) and my mind (Exhilaration at being a source of these sounds; relish at words now enhanced; critical awareness of technical matters).
Trained athletes must experience something similar. There must be parallels between preparing for - and putting - the shot and singing An die Musik – each for the thousandth time. Channelled wilfulness leading to a conviction: he/she is now a shot-putter, I am now a singer. Immediacy counts. Otherwise the shot-putter goes back to a desk in an insurance company and I to the unspecifics of retirement. Immigrants from another, demanding world.
Taking singing lessons without a final aim is self-regarding and futile. But I am those things anyway. To me singing is a willing companion and who’d reject that?
I used to run on the hills and over the countryside. Every now and then I would hit a sort of sweet spot with the exercise seeming effortless and my feet hardly touching the ground. There were other pleasures as well associated with this masochistic pursuit, but having that particular feeling was special.
ReplyDeleteSir Hugh: I think I've felt something similar, certainly when ski-ing (where the aim is how you do it rather than what you do), less frequently when swimnming my "miles". But in the end these were purely physical sensations. Singing requires me to order my thoughts as well; at any one point in a song I may have up to half a dozen demands to fullfil (pitch, rhythm, tempo, duration, intensity, etc) as well as anticipating what comes next which is even more important. On the rare occasions when I get all these things right I come close to what the composer intended and that's where the magic lies. Schubert, shall we say, has written the recipe and I have baked his cake.
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