So, I sang. And it went well. By the the time of the concert I felt pretty confident about following the music; I knew the tune well, and I got a grip on all the notes and symbols (the important ones, at least), enough to guide me in singing. It was a great feeling to have achieved that.
It was also fantastic to sing with an orchestra (albeit a small one), which I did for the first time in rehearsal on Friday. That was perhaps nicer than the actual concert, because of course there is more pressure once you're on stage.
I'm so happy I took this "project" on. I pushed through a period of uncertainty in the middle, and by the end felt I'd learnt something – and now I'm keen to learn more. I have to say that the thing that helped me most of all was making sure I stayed next to a good, confident singer, and I am grateful to my "mentor" who didn't mind me attaching myself to her in rehearsals and the final performance.
While the concert went well, and we had a pretty good audience (maybe 500 people?), one thing dampened my mood; I was disappointed that not a single one of my friends managed to make it to see me. Everyone had a reason for not being able to come, and I understand that things get in the way, so this is not directed at anyone in particular; I was just really sad I couldn't share my happiness and sense of achievement with any of the people who matter to me and who'd heard me talking about my experience during the last few months. (At least I saw one or two familiar faces, which was nice.)
Nevertheless, I plan to sing again. But next time I think I'll keep it to myself, to avoid disappointment...
on music, words and numbers
A mathematician, like a painter or a poet, is a maker of patterns. If his patterns are more permanent than theirs, it is because they are made with ideas. A painter makes patterns with shapes and colours, a poet with words. A painting may embody an "idea", but the idea is usually commonplace and unimportant. In poetry, ideas count for a good deal more; but, as Housman insisted, the importance of ideas in poetry is habitually exaggerated: "I cannot satisfy myself that there are any such things as poetical ideas...Poetry is not the thing said but a way of saying it." [...] A mathematician, on the other hand, has no material to work with but ideas, and so his patterns are likely to last longer, since ideas wear less with time than words. The mathematician's patterns, like the painter's or the poet's, must be beautiful; the ideas, like the colours or the words, must fit together in a harmonious way. Beauty is the first test: there is no permanent place in the world for ugly mathematics.From A Mathematician's Apology by G.H. Hardy.
I've never had an instinct for numbers. This surprises me a little; I have always found it easy to learn languages, and I learn best through understanding structures: how verbs are conjugated, how nouns are declined, and so on. Once I have an idea of the "shape" of a language everything sort of slots into place in my head.
So it doesn't really make sense to me that numbers just make my mind go blank. I've always assumed that I should be able to connect to numerical structures in the same way I can to linguistic structures, but beyond the most simple arithmetic I begin to struggle.
Because music and maths are so closely related, it is perhaps not strange that I don't really have a strong relationship to music, either. I used to listen to music a lot as a teenager, but over the years I have done so less and less. I prefer to listen to people speaking, whether on radio programmes or podcasts I download, and I listen to different languages, rather than different kinds of music, to match my mood. That's not to say I never listen to music, but it's just not a big part of my life.
Recently, trying to challenge myself and do something new, I joined the Manama Singers. We're performing Mozart's Requiem later this month, and rehearsing for that has been a demanding experience for me. I am very familiar with the Requiem, but as a whole piece of music; I had never thought about or picked out the separate parts (soprano, alto, tenor and bass). I don't read music – although from my schooldays I just about remember what the notes and symbols on a stave represent – so when it comes to singing in a choir, before the written music can guide me I have to learn my part by heart. (Thankfully, it turns out that you can download the highlighted parts of choral works; I got the alto part of the Requiem here.) Nevertheless, getting the tune is one thing, matching the words to it is another, and not getting confused when you're singing alongside other parts is quite another.
The funny thing is, when I joined the choir I thought I was doing something entirely different to my usual pastimes (reading and learning languages), but I soon discovered that the thing really engaging me was the process of deciphering a new kind of text. When I looked at the music on the page I felt hungry to understand it, the same feeling I have when I look at a text in a language I don't know. But I think it will take me a long, long time before I am able to look at written music and really be able to understand or make use of it.
For example, in a recent alto rehearsal, we kept going back to repeat tricky parts, and I found it almost impossible to pick up the tune in the middle of a line – because I had learnt by listening to whole blocks, according to the natural breaks in each piece of music. Certainly, if I had memorised a monologue from a play, and was asked to go back and start reciting from a middle of a sentence, then I'd find it just as hard – but if I were allowed to check the text I would have no problem. Yet looking at the music didn't help me at all, while other singers were able to look at it and pick up the tune effortlessly. (Perhaps I'm being too hard on myself, and with more practice I'll find it easier.)
Anyway, if you're interested in coming along to the Manama Singers' performance of Mozart's Requiem, it's on March 20 – details here. I will be doing my best to keep up with the other singers – though the great thing about singing in a choir is that you can just mouth the words when you're not quite sure of the notes... And after my foray into music, I suppose my next project should be to learn more about mathematics, and try to get rid of the mental block I have with numbers.
