How’s the Singing Going?

Periodically, a friend will ask, “How’s the singing going?”  The question is usually asked in a slightly hesitant tone, the way one might ask about a problem child or a follow-up mammogram after a cancer scare.  As though the asker is not sure the topic should even be broached, but doesn’t want to go ahead and assume the worst.  Unless the asker is my husband.  Then the question is asked in a tone of pure resigned hopelessness.

I haven’t worked out a good answer to that question.  I generally say that it is going, and there are positive moments – brief, flickering glimmers of light in the dark.

What follows is a more nuanced and informative answer.  I hope.

Mount Everest - Image via Wikipedia

Learning to sing, for me, is like climbing Mount Everest: I can’t see the top, or even imagine it, but I am definitely on the mountain, and I’m trudging very, very, very slowly uphill with my trusty Sherpa Patty beside me.  Sherpa Patty has climbed the mountain before, and she has a lot more confidence than I do that we’ll get, if not to the top, at least to the first camp.

Although Mount Everest reaches 29,029 feet above sea level, it is actually about 15,250 from the base of the mountain to the summit.  I figure that I’m a good 500 feet up from the base of the Mount Everest of singing.  Last week, I felt very optimistic and decided I was a thousand feet up, but then it was my daughter’s birthday on Saturday and I joined in on a rousing rendition of “Happy Birthday” and felt myself sliding back down several hundred feet.

Here’s some of what I have learned or learned to do, singing-wise, so far:

•   I have a “head voice” and a “chest voice.”  I had no idea there were such things, and certainly had not an inkling that I possessed them.
• My “chest voice” sounds like my speaking voice, and is the voice that I have always sung in.
• My “head voice” is higher and is brand new to me.  I feel like Renee Fleming when I sing with (in?) my head voice.  I don’t sound like Rene Fleming, but I do feel like her.
• Patty thinks that ultimately I will be a soprano.  Who knew?  Certainly not me.  When I was in fourth grade, the music teacher told me I was an alto; I believed her.
• I’ve gotten pretty darn good at singing an eight-note scale as Patty plays it on the piano.
• I can often sing an eight-note scale (called an octave, I think) if Patty plays only the first note
• If Patty plays just the bottom note of an octave, I can sing that note and then sometimes sing the top note and the scale (without the piano).  I have no idea how or why I can do this.
• I can sing along with Patty, matching her pitch nicely.
• I find it easier to match pitch with Patty than with the piano.
• I can mostly sing “Simple Gifts.”
• I can sing the chorus of Leonard Cohen’s “Halleluyah” mostly on-key, I think.
• Sometimes I get parts of  “The Circle Game,” but other times I botch it all up.

Patty has decided I should begin ear training.  This involves her playing a note on the piano and having me sing that note and then sing some other note related to that note.  We’ve begun with descending minor thirds, which is apparently a nearly universal interval in music.  It is the interval of the notes when kids tease each other, a la “nyah, nyah, nyah, nyah.”

So that is how the singing is going.  Only 14,750 feet left to climb.