Chanson

2/23/07

There are two owls courting in the pines behind the chateau. The male calls out a brash “hoo-hoot-a-hoo!” and the female, coquette that she is, twitters a “ta-wheet, ta-wheet” back. Monsieur Owl seems to come calling between 8-10 at night, because after 10, the night is pretty silent. The spring frogs are just starting to peep, but it’s not a chorus yet. I’ve been getting out my star chart and learning the constellations, since I imagine this is my best chance to see a sky full of stars on a consistent basis. The crocus and the daffodils are blooming, and the roses are putting out new leaves. It’s cooled off a bit this week (40’s or so) and yesterday I had to hang my laundry on a cloudy day, which meant continued drying on racks in my room last night. I re-hung the still-damp laundry on the line today (which was sunny), but a brief rainshower in the late afternoon foiled my drying attempts yet again. Mon Dieu!

I’ve been busy from 10-6 every day this week in a singing class. There are seven students (only one man) whose ages range from mid-20’s to 60-ish. Our teacher, Gerard, is a very accomplished singer and performer. The class is conducted in French, so I get most of the information from watching how the other students are coached, and the body language of the speakers. As you can imagine, this kind of concentration for 8 hours a day, in addition to the singing, is pretty taxing.

It’s interesting. Many of the concepts that Gerard is teaching are concepts that are known to me, some of which I use in my own classroom. The breathing he teaches is the same as the Roy Hart folks teach—a very deep pelvic floor muscle support for the breath. He spent some hours today teaching us vowel placement on different pitches for singing. And yesterday some hours were spent in experimenting with all the different choices a performer can make while moving on stage (walking in silence, walking and speaking, stopping, breathing, then speaking, etc.). It’s kind of an alien concept for an actor, but for singers that usually don’t do anything but stand by the piano and declaim, I can see how the exploration could be useful. Since having private lessons with Kaya and Noah helped me to explore a much higher range that that I would normally choose, I’ve chosen to continue exploring that range is my classes this week. It’s a high soprano range, so some days are “better” than others in my explorations, meaning that some days I squeak and some days a clear bell tone emerges.

On Wednesday we rehearsed the songs we will be singing for a “presentation” to the chateau on Saturday. Ah, the French. One after one, the women in my class presented their songs, and one after the other, we heard the long, melancholy, repetitive, pensive songs Americans attribute to Edith Piaf. After which, thoroughly American me got up and sang Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird” from the Beatles. Thank god for me and the male student, who is singing a medieval historical ballad, or our audience might leave mid-presentation to drown their sorrows in copious bottles of vin de pays Languedoc.

The thing I’ve had the hardest time getting used to is the difference between the English/American discipline for class, and the French “lack of discipline” (at least this class—it might be different in Paris). Class “begins” at 10, I arrive at 9:50, and then I wait for 25 minutes while most of the French students straggle in from their morning coffee. Lunch is scheduled for one hour, I come back to the rehearsal room, and the French students are still in their kitchen, finishing their cheese plate. Gerard just shrugs and says, “it’s the south of France.”

One “French” thing I love (even if it can be aggravating): if someone doesn’t want to/can’t do something, s/he just shrugs and says “C’est impossible!” with a sideways glance. There’s no explanation, and no asking why. If you did ask why, you’d just get a more aggravated repetition of the same answer. It’s sort of the grown-up equivalent to “because I say so,” and I can think of lots of uses for it. It’s sort of what the British do when they say, “oh I’m so terribly, terribly sorry but I can’t….” and the interaction is all so polite and gentile, but you know they’re not terribly sorry at all, and they probably “could,” if they wanted to.