The joy of singing

Last night I had my 3rd singing lesson. I'm still buzzing!

I have no illusions about being the next winner of X-factor or Britain's got talent - in fact I doubt that my voice will ever be good enough for solo performance. But that is not the point for me.

When I was around 10 I joined the church choir in my home village. I don't remember how long I stuck with it, but I guess 2 or 3 years. Mostly I just remember enjoying singing, to the point of even attending a regional choir camp one summer (no, it wasn't anything like band camp...).

When I was 13 I moved to a different stage of schooling which meant a bigger school with more students. The music teacher made every single student audition for a spot in the school choir. I got handed a sheet of music for a song I'd never heard and was told to sing it. As I didn't know how to sightsing I did not do well and so didn't join the choir.

At university the student theatre always did one play each year that included singing, I only acted in one of those. It was a harrowing experience. It wasn't one of the easiest pieces out there (the lyrics were set to Mein Herr from Cabaret) and I realised I knew nothing of the craft of singing.

I read somewhere Stephen Fry describing his problem with singing was that he was tone mute, rather than tone deaf. He said that he could hear music perfectly in his head, but he didn't know how to reproduce it. That is my problem. I have no musical training, nor am I a natural at it. I can look at notes and see up and down, but that's about as far as it goes.

A few years ago I attempted one of those "Find your voice courses". The blurb said it was for complete beginners and it started very basic. Breathing exercises and stuff like that - but within a couple of weeks we were onto singing different songs. For someone that was a complete beginner it was a largely pointless exercise. How am I supposed to find my voice while singing in a group and doing a different song each week? You spend your time learning a song, not how to sing.

Since then I have been yearning to be able to sing. Just knowing that if I open my mouth to join in with communal singing of any sort what comes out is not hideous. Or maybe even one day being able to actually join a choir (an amateur one obviously).

So I finally took the step of having proper 1-1 singing lessons. I was incredibly nervous before my first lesson. I had no idea what to expect and most of all I was nervous that it would turn out that I couldn't be taught.

3 lessons later and I'm hitting the right notes based on the piano pretty much every time. This was one of the things I was most nervous about. I wasn't sure how one goes about hitting certain notes with one's voice just based on the piano - and it is quite an essential skill if one wants to aspire to joining a choir. But I can do it!! And with practice I will hopefully learn to trust myself instead of glancing at my teacher at the start of each scale to check that she is smiling and nodding to indicate I got it right.

My homework this week is to work on the blade (I think that was what she called it) - how you get your voice to carry through projecting via your sinuses. Last week I worked on learning "Early One Morning" and now I have learn to sing it while making it all nasal to project it. It sounds pretty hideous, but I'm told is a phase you have to through as you are learning. Once you are able to project the voice properly you learn how to round it and make it sound good. One step at a time, I guess. :-)

Fringe - a study in gender stuff

Watched Fringe last night. I love that series, they manage to make the outrageous stuff going on believable AND it has several interesting plot arcs both for the overall plot and for the characters. Great stuff!

One thing that I particularly admire is the gender role reversal for two of the main characters. One main character is an FBI agent - a strong character that wields a gun and is able to make hard calls. One main character has a brilliant father that needs baby-sitting and there's the emotional issue of them having been estranged for many years while the father was locked away in a psychiatric hospital.

Traditionally, you would expect the strong, gun-wielding agent to be a man and the person baby-sitting their father and trying to repair their relationship to be a woman. But in Fringe it is the other way around. I love that! I think it is great to see characters that are a bit different to the norm. Their gender is obviously part of what makes them who they are, but it doesn't limit them or lock them into stereotypes. Just like real people.

To my mind men and women are different in many ways. Physically and mentally we have different strengths and weaknesses. But the same is true about people in general. Some people are smarter than others. Some are better at maths, some are better at drawing. Unfortunately when it comes to gender there are still issues out there with regards to equal opportunities, equal pay etc. A large TV show having characters that break the gender stereotypes while still being of their gender is a great thing.

When I say "of their gender" I mean that the character is not portrayed as overly being / trying to be like the other gender. Using examples from Fringe, Olivia is a very strong person, she has to be in such a tough job. But that doesn't mean that she has to masculinise herself to do a good job. She has long hair (though usually pulled back - understandably, you don't want hair messing up your aim), wears some make-up - does girly things with her sister and niece. Peter seems to have no issue that Olivia is the leader of their little team. He follows her orders and does not carry a gun. If there is any defending to do it usually falls to Olivia and/or other agents as he is not trained for it. And he is baby-sitting his bonkers dad 24/7. But he is still very much a man.

The more of that kind of thing enters our everyday culture, the better it will be. The more natural it will be for people to assume that women and men are not limited by their gender in what they want to work with / spend their free time doing.

Being a female that likes computer games and gadgets is viewed by many as unusual as they go with the geek stereotype being all male. Out of the people that I know that have such interests I would say that the majority are male, but it is not a huge majority by any means. And it wouldn't surprise me if there are a lot of girls out there that have the interests but keep it private. As with many other things people will make judgements about you based purely on that one facet of your interests.

Harry Dresden

I stumbled across the first of the Dresden files, Storm Front, a few years ago and was seriously disappointed when I got to the end of the lot that was currently published. They are incredibly more-ish - not helped by the fact that once you start one you cannot put it down, so you finish them at warp-speed.

I finished book 11, Turn Coat, the other week and I'm already drooling after the next one. I could actually get my hands on the hard-cover version of Changes, but I love the look of the paperbacks I've got so I'm going to try to stay disciplined. Time will tell I guess.

If you haven't read them, I cannot recommend them highly enough. It's hard to describe them in a way that does them justice though.

It's all written in first person from Harry's point of view, but don't let that put you off. I normally don't like that style at all, but it is done really well. The pace of the books is one to leave you breathless. You get sucked in and they are absolutely impossible to put down, each chapter leaves you wanting to know what happens next.

What it is about? Well, that is a good question. Harry is an impoverised private investigator, who also happens to be a wizard (the only one in the yellow pages, so he says). The whole magic, supernatural thing is introduced in a very believeable way. Like most series, the first few books are quite stand-alone (though of course reading them in order does make things make more sense) - but by book 11 there is a huge amount of overarching side-plots going on as well.

Weaving a complex tapestry is the phrase that comes to mind. However, even with reading one book a year there is never any problem getting back into who is who or what is what as the author does slip in little comments to jog your memory in each book. Amazingly, these little reminders never feel forced or out of place. As a writer-wannabe I truly admire the ease with which he slips in these little things to help out the memory of old readers and quickly explain stuff to newcomers.

Anyways, I guess it is back to re-reading Eddings for the fifty-eleventh time while I wait for the next Dresden paperback. At least I now have a shiny new set of the Belgariad, Malloreon, Elenium and Tamuli. (Asked for the lot for my birthday as our current copies have been so well-read they were falling to pieces.)