Singing, Part I

I've had a number of internet sites ask me recently for a profile, and I'm never sure how to describe myself. "Utterly, consumately ordinary. Wallflower. Scary suburban Prozac-type existence. That default silhouette under 'Photo' is a good resemblance." (This is not a description I would recommend for LinkedIn.)

I have eschewed the wife-and-mother description, settling instead on the things I enjoy doing. First on the list is generally singing, which I guess is fair because I do devote several hours each week to singing in a church choir.

Growing up I loved to sing, and I think this sprang from two things. One, I have always loved going to church, and Methodists are very big on singing. I love hymns. There's all this business today about how people don't want to sing hymns in church--the texts are weird, the music is old-fashioned. Well I loved them as a kid, and they were mostly old even then--I grew up in the 70s when we defined "square". One of the reasons I love church is the singing.

The other thing was that my parents both love music. We had a console stereo and a closet full of LPs--my dad's classical albums, and my mother's collection of Big Band, country, and miscellaneous Hawaiian, Tijuana Brass, etc. (If you have not heard the Tijuana Brass, you must watch here. The sound is poor, and there's a guy playing an enormous drum set in his shorts, but it is the original recording. I guarantee your butt will be dancing in your chair.) I grew up listening to classic singers I can't even name, learning all the words and singing along. (I particularly liked a very jazzy version of "Green Eyes", and another jazzy version of "Fever." I always liked the jazzy versions--the sort of off-beat stuff.)

Once I got old enough to discover AM radio, that opened up the world of popular music which was a somewhat psychedelic place in the 70s. Instead of Britney Spears we had John Denver and Cat Stevens and Led Zeppelin. For my 16th birthday I got my own stereo, complete with cassette tape recorder. My uncle sent me three tapes--Neil Diamond and Barbra Streisand. Who knows how many hours my mother had to listen to me singing along with Barbra in my room (on headphones, probably--to make it worse).

But that's nothing compared to the hours my mother had to listen to me practicing the piano growing up. (She would say I should have spent more hours than I did practicing, but she's probably thankful I didn't.) My folks got me a piano when I was in the third grade. Now that I look back on it, that was an amazing leap of faith. I don't remember any discussions leading up to this--maybe they made me swear in blood that I would play for N years if they got it, but I don't remember. They got the piano, put me in lessons, and I went. I may not have been a very willing practicer, but I loved playing the piano. The piano is so expressive. I still love to play if I can find something I can get through fairly smoothly. I think I thought there was some natural progression where you just got better and better until you wound up being a concert pianist. It would have helped if I had been willing to dedicate more than 29.5 minutes per day, but as it was, I did not have a lot of natural ability. I had to work for a long time on each and every song to get it to the point where I could play all but one page of it pretty well--there was always one page that was just impossible.

(To truly understand my mother's patience, you must know that I had a teacher that really liked 20th century music. I had an entire book of Bartok. Here is a little piece of Bartok. I didn't play anything nearly this difficult, but it was just as weird. And since it was weird, you had to play it over and over and over until you got it. The strange thing was that after you played one of these things twenty zillion times, sometimes you wound up kind of liking it. A sort of Stockholm syndrome for musicians.)

Something to do with the fact that you had to practice the piano, and work on your technique, made it seem like much more of a challenge than singing. Singing just happened when you opened your mouth. To this day I am too nervous to play the piano for anyone, even my husband, but I will sing for anybody no problem. I wasn't about to give up on the piano, until finally in college I realized that I had probably gotten as good as I was ever going to get. It's sort of like Guitar Hero. I've finished the Medium level, and I'm probably not going to make a lot of progress on Hard. Way too much of life seems like that. There's a bunch of things you can get to be reasonably decent at, but then you hit your limit. If you think of school and captains choosing up teams (I was always near the end if it was athletic), there are only a few activities I can think of where I'm good enough to be selected early on. (Pictionary is the only thing leaping to mind, really). My limit usually seems to be right around "mediocre", I'm not sure if that is normal or if it varies by individual.

Singing is one of those things, however, where it is too scary to wonder how good you are. Some days, some situations, you think--darn I'm good. Yeah. Then other times you hear other people being *so* good and you think "what the heck was I thinking? What exactly do I think I'm doing here?" Maybe it isn't singing, maybe it is just whatever you think you are pretty good at. Maybe that is the thing where you are vulnerable because you want to be good.

[Update: more music links in the comments.]