Cloud 12 1/2

I'm on about Cloud Twelve and a Half. This has been one of the most incredible days I've ever had.

The morning began rather innocuously. I had a lovely conversation with e, which is joyful in and of itself, of course. Then, I went to my Voice Repertoire class. There, we learned more about the nuances of French diction - when vowels are closed or open and why, when to elide/liase sounds between words, and what "vocalic harmonization" is (the principle that an ambiguous vowel follows its neighbors in pronunciation. If the nearby syllable is open, the vowel is more open. If it's closed, the vowel is more closed. Think of it as creating a harmonious sound. It's similar to why we like poems that rhyme. There's something comforting about similarity in language.)

At this point, I ran to a practice room to warm up before my voice lesson. While the lesson itself was cancelled, I did get to meet with my composer. And this is where things really started to become amazing. CL is a highly creative and very gentle soul. He's writing a piece to a poem by Lia Purpura, an American poet. As part of a larger composer-singer project around Ms. Purpura's poetry, I've been paired with CL to debut the piece that he writes. Today, he wanted to get a sense of my voice since he's going to tailor-make the piece for me. (How awesome is that?!) To that end, I sang some pieces that my voice teacher considers representative of my voice - "Pantomime" and "Clair de Lune" by Debussy, a snatch of Handel's "Rejoice Greatly", and Chausson's "Chanson d'Ophelia", which is quite low but shows the warmth and roundness of my lower voice well.

CL asked many wonderful questions about my range, about what's doable as a singer, and about different sounds that you can make with your voice. Violins and other instruments have "extended technique", which is where you make non-traditional sounds with the instrument -- sounds that aren't made by bowing but rather by tapping on the body, etc. CL wanted to know whether voice has something similar. We talked about quasi parlato - literally "almost spoken" - instructions in music and about the different ways that singers perform jazz vs. rock vs. pop vs. classical music. We talked about different ways to elongate syllables, focusing solely on consonants or repeating vowels. And we talked about colors - the way different vowels or even composer instructions can bring out different colors in the voice. Certain notes, too, have a different quality. For instance, F and F# two above middle C (F5 and F#5 for all you musicians) have a particularly strident quality for many sopranos.

What was even more interesting than the conversation, however, was the actual singing we did. After I'd sung the Debussy, Handel, and Chausson, CL asked me if I'd like to improvise. He placed the poem upon a music stand, and he sat down at the piano. He just played on the fly, and I sang on top whatever came to mind, reading and following the text. I was able to be so in the moment for most of it, just expressing and completely letting go.

CL began with a dark, muddled atonal accompaniment. Then, he tried it very staccato and frenetic. The next one, at my suggestion, was more lyrical. At this point, I started recording because this was just too cool not to be able to look back on. Plus, it should help me find different ideas for expressing the poem in the eventual piece CL composes. We explored tonal varieties (much harder since there are real rules for what sounds "right" and what doesn't and what should progress to what.) Finally, CL tried a polytonal variety. Polytonal music is evidently where you have consonant chords, each with a tonality, but any chord can go to any other chord. In regular tonal music, there's a defined progression: tonic (I) to predominant (ii or IV) to dominant (V) to tonic (I) again. In polytonal music, that progression goes out the window. It has the sense of randomness without the same dissonance that atonal music has. Very, very cool.

We finished after an hour, and CL seemed happy. He wanted to explore ideas of what the poem could be, and he said that he'd have fragments of our work floating around in his mind as he went to compose. He's planning to come to my lesson next week where he can talk to my voice teacher about what is pedagogically sound (healthy) and what is possible with colors and range. He's very sensitive to making sure that what he composes is healthy to sing, which makes me SO happy. There are composers who disregard the fact that singers can actually hurt their instruments by singing wrongly, something that is a career and personal liability. It's not like we can go buy another violin if we break a string. But CL is really, really great about thinking about what's comfortable to sing.

This alone would have been enough to more than make my day. But then, I got to attend an amazing conference on entrepreneurship in music. I'll write separately about that since this entry is getting a bit lengthy by now. If you've read this far, I congratulate you. You win the "Ability to Plow Through Wordy Writing" award. Felicitaciones.

~Hope