A New Perspective...

OR, Silver Linings...

OR, well, the usual disjointed ramblings...

So, I was going at some point to do a bit of comparing and contrasting of last year with this, having been out here for the full year and starting again yesterday with the new theatre "term" (Spielzeit - season).

However I think that's going to have to wait. I had a small epiphany this evening - I love my voice!! This may sound like nonsense to non-singers, but believe me, it is not a given. As you know, because of the various catastrophes this summer has seen fit to dish out to me, I am still working on regaining the full range and power of my voice. Working bloody hard, I may say. Getting there. It is however a slow and frustrating progress, and the sounds that result are not necessarily the most pleasant.

Practice sessions are therefore often interrupted for necessary breaks or to check various websites. On one such, this afternoon, I found a request for repertoire help from a particularly dear online friend in America. What she was asking for was right up my street, so I nipped over to my website to check what was there. Normally I only visit my own website from the back, as it were; I don't listen to the sound clips I have posted. This was meant to be a flying visit, so I went in as a visitor. And got to rummaging around in my own sound clips, looking for something. And somehow got entranced!

Now this is amazing. Usually, when I listen to recordings of myself, all I can hear is the mistakes, the bad bits. This was utterly turned upside down, like those pictures where you can see a face which may be of an old woman or of a young woman; for a while, you can see nothing but your original impression, then looking changes everything, and often you can see nothing but the new image. Well without having lost the ability to flinch at a bum note or a sadly-turned vowel, I can honestly say that I've never appreciated the quality of my own voice as much. Presumably because what I'm hearing on the recordings is currently not reflected in the practice room; but WHAT a gift, to fall in love with one's own voice! I am sternly telling my subconscious to hold on to this appreciation, in the full knowledge that it will be rapidly superseded by the usual nit-picking, but in the hope that something, SOMETHING of this appreciation will remain, a welcome side-product of catastrophe.