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Session 4 - 1st Dec 2010
First James Oxley took us through a rigorous vocal warm-up, one reportedly used by all the most esteemed and heavenly singers. He had us humming and moving up a few assorted scales as a group. I made the inexcusable error of assuming I couldn't ask silly questions because of everybody else having a certain level of musical knowledge. I'm ashamed to say I couldn't follow James' dexterous talk about chromatic scales, and half-steps, but it was good to sense our individual sounds coming together into real notes (standing next to James meant all I had to do was try and copy him...). He said some fascinating things of which I'd love to know more: about trying to avoid the note having too much air in it, and so being too breathy (I forget the particular word he used). Also the anecdote about Dickens warming up his voice with his hand on his chest and imagining the sound issuing through his hand, and so making himself bell-clear to all of 4000 people. When we moved on to words - choosing 'Sing' rather than Dean's more ambitious suggestion 'Together' - it felt like we all enjoyed sliding down the scale and making the sound thrive into the 'ing' sound. I don't know if I actually heard James quip something like "Now we're getting a bit 'cadential'...", but he had me remembering that cadence and cadenza come from the Italian for fall. We were all trying to fall as powerfully as possible through the scale. At some point we all turned 90 degrees and placed a fingertip on our neighbour's cervical vertebrae - one called C6 gave off a distinct vibration with its owner's hum. There was also something called 'pinging', which involved a high note whipping up from the back of the neck and unfurling over the head, which people seemed to find satisfying.
Our singing voices thoroughly prepared, James reminded us of Odysseus' four encounters with the dead in Book 11. We heard text for each: Elpenor complaining that he'd been left like a common drunkard without a soldier's burial after getting all 'cadential' off Circe's roof, Tiresias predicting Odysseus' future, Achilles lamenting his glorious position in the underworld and enquiring after his beloved son, and Odysseus' mother explaining how she died and about what's going on back in Ithaca. I found the readings very moving - there's something very poignant about seeing Odysseus informed of his future death by someone who is already dead (and interesting that only a change of tense distinguishes Tiresias' 'story' from the others which make up this book). I always think his death sounds very benign, but then the prospect of the underworld is horrible: it's so weird to think that what awaits our hero is a kind of underground car park full of tortured souls, like fancy-dress revellers on come-downs. We then took a slight diversion into our own experience - James asking "Has anyone here met a dead person?" Simon told a story involving himself, the mailed arm of a Civil War veteran (Roundhead or Cavalier?), a dog called Cromwell, the cleaner from his youth, and his Dad - Doctor Muller. Maddy was asked to produce a libretto for an operatic version, using four singers with personal composers at their shoulder like demons/guardian angels. Maddy would serve up a line, the composer a tune, and the singer would do their best to embody the two. The best bit was watching the composers writhe around in weird, clandestine delight as they devised their singers' torture. We began to see the great potential for 'expressiveness' in the range of notes and their relative length. Even this neccessarily ramshackle production showed very clearly that sung drama makes total sense - song as simply an extension of the speaking voice, with its infinite range of emotion and intention and whatever else transposed to a bigger, non-naturalistic (more epic?) scale.
Sitting in a circle afterwards, we got a kind of droning hum going (I forget which note James said it was ) and took it in turns to sing a word or phrase from Odyssey over the top (eg. "longing", "sacrifice", "rosy-fingered"). It took us a while to get into this, the hum taking its time to level out into a seamless, integrated backdrop (TC noticed how at a certain point it "filled the floor like dry ice"). It was nerve-wracking too. We noticed the tendency to sing at the level of or beneath the note of the drone, as anything higher was a kind of exposure (I forget who said "like sticking your head above the parapet"). Also the anxiety about shifting through the notes on single syllables; we were challenged to remedy these during the next round. Following observations included how "at some point we lost the major fifth" (whatever that means), and how little narratives were beginning to develop, words inspiring words inspiring words etc. Also the difficulty in making out some of the words being sung, and how the final consonant would often end up shedding light on what had come before like the last chapter of a book or the homecoming moment of a journey. Our final round saw us attempting to be especially clear, and to deliberately sustain some kind of story (one particularly literal series went "shipbuilding", "waves", "horizon"). James recognised a certain musical key becoming associated with a particular theme (I think it was 'war'). This all allowed a sharper focus on what had been apparent in Simon's opera and, especially when James Oxley sang, revealed this type of shifting, swooping, melodic utterance as the natural form for our story's words.
The session culminated in four groups devising song and movement for each Book 11 underworld encounter. When TC blithely told us to "sing in Ancient Greek", Kobna reacted to my anxious look by reminding me that I was a total expert. Of course, silly me. Our group, doing Elpenor, had a pool of blood made out of a red plastic chair and two pairs of red socks. John Hopkins, as Ulysses, wielded a broom handle. I was Elpenor, and found it difficult to remember more than a few syllables of my Greek, which made it almost impossible to tell my story while fending off the other tormented souls lusting after the chair and the socks. As we moved towards a 'presentation', we were asked to avoid half-singing (a form of sitting on the parapet - rather than the fence - when we needed to be leaping over it) and to make sure all our movements were non-naturalistic. I was glad to see that the attempt to sing in Greek had been abandoned: when the shows got going the prevailing style was a sort of sung Orghast, a limitless range of non-verbal song which allowed everybody simply to release themselves into what they were doing. All the encounters were wild, as if through liberating our singing voices we'd become a troop of Corybants, those women in Greek myth who wheel about singing in ecstatic worship of the goddess Cybele. One encounter became a shifting mass of writhing, tangled bodies, as Odysseus attempted to bat away the hungry ghosts. Very exciting. The encounters between O and his mother, and between O and Tiresias (I think) both featured fascinating compound characters, with two bodies representing O and two bodies representing his mother's soul. Poppy and somebody else (sorry, memory failing) did O as a kind of upright pantomime horse, or pantomime gorilla. Bailey and one other (sorry again) gave O's mother a kind of two-part soul, with one sheering off, wilting away, under the pressure of the encounter. It certainly felt like by opening our vocal chords we'd released our bodies too, somehow. I'm nursing a prolapsed disc at the moment, and wasn't able to do anything remotely non-naturalistic as Elpenor (who dies because his spinal chord is in a far worse state). But from what I saw the past three hours had found a sort of common ground on which the voice and the body could work/play together, with particular Homeric currency - or simply reminded us that the voice is only a particularly rich and various asset of the body. Thanks to James Oxley, and everyone present.
Our singing voices thoroughly prepared, James reminded us of Odysseus' four encounters with the dead in Book 11. We heard text for each: Elpenor complaining that he'd been left like a common drunkard without a soldier's burial after getting all 'cadential' off Circe's roof, Tiresias predicting Odysseus' future, Achilles lamenting his glorious position in the underworld and enquiring after his beloved son, and Odysseus' mother explaining how she died and about what's going on back in Ithaca. I found the readings very moving - there's something very poignant about seeing Odysseus informed of his future death by someone who is already dead (and interesting that only a change of tense distinguishes Tiresias' 'story' from the others which make up this book). I always think his death sounds very benign, but then the prospect of the underworld is horrible: it's so weird to think that what awaits our hero is a kind of underground car park full of tortured souls, like fancy-dress revellers on come-downs. We then took a slight diversion into our own experience - James asking "Has anyone here met a dead person?" Simon told a story involving himself, the mailed arm of a Civil War veteran (Roundhead or Cavalier?), a dog called Cromwell, the cleaner from his youth, and his Dad - Doctor Muller. Maddy was asked to produce a libretto for an operatic version, using four singers with personal composers at their shoulder like demons/guardian angels. Maddy would serve up a line, the composer a tune, and the singer would do their best to embody the two. The best bit was watching the composers writhe around in weird, clandestine delight as they devised their singers' torture. We began to see the great potential for 'expressiveness' in the range of notes and their relative length. Even this neccessarily ramshackle production showed very clearly that sung drama makes total sense - song as simply an extension of the speaking voice, with its infinite range of emotion and intention and whatever else transposed to a bigger, non-naturalistic (more epic?) scale.
Sitting in a circle afterwards, we got a kind of droning hum going (I forget which note James said it was ) and took it in turns to sing a word or phrase from Odyssey over the top (eg. "longing", "sacrifice", "rosy-fingered"). It took us a while to get into this, the hum taking its time to level out into a seamless, integrated backdrop (TC noticed how at a certain point it "filled the floor like dry ice"). It was nerve-wracking too. We noticed the tendency to sing at the level of or beneath the note of the drone, as anything higher was a kind of exposure (I forget who said "like sticking your head above the parapet"). Also the anxiety about shifting through the notes on single syllables; we were challenged to remedy these during the next round. Following observations included how "at some point we lost the major fifth" (whatever that means), and how little narratives were beginning to develop, words inspiring words inspiring words etc. Also the difficulty in making out some of the words being sung, and how the final consonant would often end up shedding light on what had come before like the last chapter of a book or the homecoming moment of a journey. Our final round saw us attempting to be especially clear, and to deliberately sustain some kind of story (one particularly literal series went "shipbuilding", "waves", "horizon"). James recognised a certain musical key becoming associated with a particular theme (I think it was 'war'). This all allowed a sharper focus on what had been apparent in Simon's opera and, especially when James Oxley sang, revealed this type of shifting, swooping, melodic utterance as the natural form for our story's words.
The session culminated in four groups devising song and movement for each Book 11 underworld encounter. When TC blithely told us to "sing in Ancient Greek", Kobna reacted to my anxious look by reminding me that I was a total expert. Of course, silly me. Our group, doing Elpenor, had a pool of blood made out of a red plastic chair and two pairs of red socks. John Hopkins, as Ulysses, wielded a broom handle. I was Elpenor, and found it difficult to remember more than a few syllables of my Greek, which made it almost impossible to tell my story while fending off the other tormented souls lusting after the chair and the socks. As we moved towards a 'presentation', we were asked to avoid half-singing (a form of sitting on the parapet - rather than the fence - when we needed to be leaping over it) and to make sure all our movements were non-naturalistic. I was glad to see that the attempt to sing in Greek had been abandoned: when the shows got going the prevailing style was a sort of sung Orghast, a limitless range of non-verbal song which allowed everybody simply to release themselves into what they were doing. All the encounters were wild, as if through liberating our singing voices we'd become a troop of Corybants, those women in Greek myth who wheel about singing in ecstatic worship of the goddess Cybele. One encounter became a shifting mass of writhing, tangled bodies, as Odysseus attempted to bat away the hungry ghosts. Very exciting. The encounters between O and his mother, and between O and Tiresias (I think) both featured fascinating compound characters, with two bodies representing O and two bodies representing his mother's soul. Poppy and somebody else (sorry, memory failing) did O as a kind of upright pantomime horse, or pantomime gorilla. Bailey and one other (sorry again) gave O's mother a kind of two-part soul, with one sheering off, wilting away, under the pressure of the encounter. It certainly felt like by opening our vocal chords we'd released our bodies too, somehow. I'm nursing a prolapsed disc at the moment, and wasn't able to do anything remotely non-naturalistic as Elpenor (who dies because his spinal chord is in a far worse state). But from what I saw the past three hours had found a sort of common ground on which the voice and the body could work/play together, with particular Homeric currency - or simply reminded us that the voice is only a particularly rich and various asset of the body. Thanks to James Oxley, and everyone present.
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