walking away

I can be pretty tenacious but I’ve recently been thinking about two situations I’ve been in with regard to singing when I would have done better to back out, admit to myself that I’d made a mistake and do something else. Both were a considerable time ago and not where I live now.

At one time I studied with a singing teacher whose approach to interpretation involved relating what you were singing directly to specific personal experiences of yours. Now I don’t deny there can be some benefit in this, though it’s not the only way: if you find the mood of a particular song difficult to enter into, why not imagine yourself as a character in a play or novel who might feel that way? There might be good reasons to keep personal experiences and singing separate; for example, someone might be singing in order to put bad experiences out of their mind.

My teacher came to know rather more than was really desirable about my life outside singing and made several comments about it which were not only wrong (in hindsight) but potentially damaging. I don’t think any of this was helping me to sing well, and I realise now that rather than allowing myself to be intruded on to this extent I should have found someone else to study with.

The other situation concerned a singer in a choir I was once in who took it on themselves to do the conductor’s job; they repeatedly commented behind his back on how the soprano section was too loud and I suspect the comments were aimed in part at me. There was indeed a problem with balance, but it was the common one that the soprano section was stronger than the others; there were more singers who were trained or in training, some to a high level. As a result we projected our sound more strongly even when singing quietly. I affected not to care about this, but I did feel I was under pressure to sing with poor technique and I didn’t totally withstand it. When I left the choir I had lost the habit of singing with proper bodily support; I should instead have left much earlier.