Music again

This whole business of learning to play the piano is fascinating stuff. For example having to learn the left and right hands separately before putting them together is dead curious. Right now by accident my latest tune is Ding Dong Merrily on High one of my favourite carols. It has a marvelous chorus which I love trying to sing without taking a breathe. The right hand does some real fun stuff, I guess it kinda of represents church bells. If I switch my electric piano seeting to Church organ it is delightful to listen to.

Now when I put the two hands together as I have just begun to do then I can't play it yet at sufficient speed so that it sounds like the carol. Slowed down it rather sounds like a minaret, rather like a 18th Century dance you might hear in a Jane Austen film. A stunning effect.

On another tune the right hand alone sounded very Scottish and plaintive but when put with the left it sounds more North American. It does make you wonder how stuff gets composed and how what might at first seem like very different left and right hand bits but blend well when put togethr. I am sorry but I can't help thinking of the Pets and Neil's melancholic thoughtful lyrics and Chris' high NRG music. You wouldn't think it would work but it does and feeds both sides of me.

And I guess that points to how I can resonate with Jnaanese culture wwhich is both delightful and artistic and stunning and sometimes so low brow - kirsch as well. Well they did invent karoake, Sumo wrestling and caligraphy and artwork to die for.

I guess it is too late for me to acquire taste and I would not want to lose something precious to me in the process. I can't go so single minded as that.

Best to all,

Bill on bike

Music again

With my piano teacher Rebbecca last night and doing some singing. She was full of praise and I find this hard to take because somewhere inside I still don't believe I can sing. And yet after the lesson I was on my bike doing some of the practice singing that I knew sounded right and then I launched into the Al Bowly song 'Have you ever been lonely?' It felt good to sing I was relaxed and with a passion for the words and I heard myself sing and I was in tune. I could deny the truth of my ears and yes I know we do not hear exactly what we say or sing but it was good. When I sing at work walking up the stairs - it is so natural to me to sing but I always thought I was rubbish at it but now I am not so sure. Sometimes when I am relaxed it sounds good to me.

In my 2+ octaves singing voice I have 2 parts to it, my bass part below middle C is easy to hit and I am comfortable and it is where I used to place myself in Carol Donaldson's Intergenerational Choir. Then there is my 'falsetto' part above middle C which is where I used to mostly sing for pop tunes. This is a bit harder for me but feels good when I get it right. The few notes in between are the hardest as I switch between the two but Rebbecca is helping me work this.

I am stunned by this. I think I am going to have to record my voice just too convince myself further. Rebbecca is no pussy cat but I still can't truly take in all her praise for my signing.

My paternal Grandad Albert sang in a church choir. My maternal great grandfather Thomas was a Welsh Baptist minister so I guess he sang too. Maybe its in my genes. My Quaker Meeting is planning to do 'Joseph' as a Christmas thing so I guess I will join in as part of the chorus and it's time to email Carol again to find out about a choir...

My mum always said to me that if you wanted to do something badly enough you could i.e. go for it. Well a new choir and one of these days Grade One piano will do for me for now. Oh yes and my first live public poetry reading - watch this space.

Best to all,

Bill on bike and loving it

Music again

Cycling into work today, clear blue sky, sun in my face some of the way, it's cold in a pleasant sort of a way - kind of tangy, just the day for a long cycle ride but alas work calls...

With my piano teacher Rebbecca last night doing the singing part of the lesson she got me to sing two notes separated by a semi tone. She then got me to sing from one to another and back again and it felt like a figure of 8 and my body moved in that shape. (I quite often get movement to music which I sometimes turn into dance). Listening to myself sing I could not really tell the notes apart but she could. I can always tell if my singing is the same as the piano note she sounds because I hear and feel the resonance between the two. So we went down my almost 2 octaves with singing these pairs. Oh my!

Later I watched the choir on BBC2 in which this mazing guy - Gareth - has decided to try and set up a choir in a working class housing estate South Oxley near Watford. It's rather like he is doing community work and he gets 200people to the first meeting and then last night he got some primary school children from the 6 schools to form a children's choir. He also challenges the prejudice against this estate among more well today people living near by by getting the choir a gig in the highly regarded Colosseum Theatre in Watford.

I wept silently with tears running down my face. Sheila asked me if I was OK and I howled. I don't claim to be working class but until I met with Rebbecca no-one has explored my love of music with me or offered me an instrument to try out. OK I could have done this early although being told to mime at my primary school by my music teacher shut me up and closed me down. I believed I could not sing and could not read music until my daughter showed me how to read music in 5 minutes flat and how to play a couple of notes.

It's hard work playing the piano but the satisfaction is immense as is the times I have song in the family choir at my daughter's school. So I am looking to rejoin that choir or another one.

This passion for what you want to do - I remember blurting out to John McLeod that I wanted to do a PhD 18 years ago. I didn't know until I said it that I did and he welcomed it and my life has never been the same. So I stand by people's hidden passions, by education as drawing out that which we have inside and which needs an outlet. These lack of outlets is real poverty and collectively as a society we have a lot to answer for. We don't get to a good place by making people smaller. Bring on the singers, the musicians, the writers, the poets, the counsellors, the artists, the teachers, the gardeners, the farmers, anything really where people love what they do and just do it. And let's support each of us living out the dream from inside.

To go spiritual God wants me to be full of myself. Sure there is a risk of egotism or narcissism but also there is a risk of what I call 'negative egotism' in which people put themselves down and don't do that which they dream of doing.

Do you know I didn't think that Rebbecca as a trained musician would be bothered to help me sing. I didn't expect to hear her praise when I hit the notes. Or hear her taking the trouble to help me figure what I am doing and what I need to do to develop my voice. Of course she is a professional through and through so why would I expect otherwise? No but I expected her to politely say that we don't do it. Can you see what a mess I was in over this? And what healing i am experiencing!

I am not saying that I will ever be a famous musician or even perform in public. I still hope to play to my friends one day. But when we have these unexplored dreams and we don't explore them it's so sad, its a shrinking of the spirit and its against God. There!

Thanks for reading as ever I welcome your comments and your stories!

Bill on bike

PS. The latest bit for me is inching towards a real poetry performance. OH God why? But I have to. I have a couple of possibilities next month so watch this space!

Music again

So i copied my last blog entry to Carol Donaldson who runs the Intergenerational Choir and she replied in part:
"Yes, it's amazing how singing together engenders such good feeling. I think a combination of the physical (deep breathing which oxygenates and calms), the mental (brain busy concentrating on harmonies, so too absorbed to worry about life/ourselves) and the emotional (lovely bonding experience) and sometimes I think we can reach the spiritual, when we're singing a powerful song and there's so much good intent in the room, it does raise us all up."

This last week I have had a profound, and I think spiritual, shift in my piano playing. I had started to get some aches in the muscles of my upper arms (I had these for many months 10 years and nothing - massage, herbal remedies, oils, sacro cranial therapy shifted it and then I dreamt of Peter Mandelson and the aches left me! - If you are interested I'll tell you the whole story some time :)).

I thought 'Oh No, will this stop me learning piano?' So I finally talked about this with Rebecca my piano teacher (I'll blog more about her teaching another time). When I get tense in playing I hit the keys hard - rather like Thelonius Monk but not so good. To avoid getting tense and loud I have to play slower and softer and quieter and I start to relish the music more and notice each note. It then becomes a kind of meditation, I enjoy it more and it relaxes me more and paradoxically it sounds better.

So I am not rushing to play something anymore instead enjoying the indwelling particularly on those pieces I really relish playing. So something is shifting internally in this process and it feels like doing yoga or mediation or Quaker silence.

Isn't life strange? And of course I found that Rebecca has a fascination with the spiritual. Kind of typical synchronicity for me.

Bill-on-bike avoiding the frost spots or walking the bike, but loving the stars - have you seen Venus and Jupiter they were close to the moon a couple of weeks ago, it was magic to me - the wonder of it all!