y2fizzy

Yesterday my Sweet Adelines chorus had a pep rehearsal with an external coach. She was quite good. I learned a lot about singing that I had not appreciated before. In particular, the extent to which the physical positioning of your mouth/tongue/vowels when singing can affect pitch. When you sing, the shape of your instrument is always changing, and the only way to keep the pitch you want is to continually make microadjustments. But: you can train your habits to make as few physical changes as possible, so you minimize the compensation you have to make. This accounts for a lot of the characteristic barbershop sound - the choices you make to do this are different from choral or other styles of singing.

This comes as a relief. I recently downloaded the TE tuner app, and found that even when I'm singing and *think* I'm on the right pitch, often I'm sharp/flat in ways that are hard for me to hear and correct. I'm off by more scale degrees than the adjustment needed for just intonation. So my work to pick out which note I'm singing in each chord and color-code them to learn to adjust their pitch isn't particularly helpful, as I can't sing that accurately even if I try. Or so I thought. Maybe with this new concept of singing I'll get better at hitting the pitch I intend. It is hard to hear a pitch you're singing and make microtonal adjustments on the fly.

But that's not the reason I sat down to write today. I'm writing because of something that happened during the coaching session. We were singing a passage repeatedly - first just the leads, then leads and tenor - trying to help the leads keep to the correct pitches. To me it sounded like they were ending up a half step flat, not just a tuning issue. We kept starting the passage in the middle of a phrase, and after 3-4 runs through, I couldn't find my part anymore. I couldn't even remember what notes I was supposed to sing. I felt utterly lost, and couldn't help, or even sing. So I stopped everyone, told them I couldn't find the pitch anymore, and asked to start again back at the beginning of the phrase. Then I was fine, and it also helped my fellow tenor - who turned to thank me because she was having the same problem.

After we finished that part and turned to the next session, I felt shaky and ready to cry. I told myself: you're a grown up, and if you need to cry, you can go cry. So I nipped out to the restroom, where I went and cried. I hyperventilated. I drank some soda water. I wiped my face with a damp towel, like I used to do in college. And I pulled myself together and went back to the rehearsal. It still took a few minutes to feel properly engaged again.

There's a fair amount to unpack there. What we were doing was hard. I went back later that day to analyze the chords in that passage, but we weren't starting on a 7th or anything that felt too difficult. I just got so absorbed into the lead part that I couldn't remember the notes of my own anymore. The line was gone, the intervals were almost there but I felt I'd lost my anchor to sing them correctly. Nothing felt right. I can only imagine it's like the early stages of Alzheimers, where you can't remember something that feels so obvious to you - like what street you live on. Or maybe like Simone Biles getting the "twisties" and not knowing which way is up anymore. I can't tell if my tears were more for the embarrassment (of telling everyone I was lost), or feeling disturbed that my musical intuition abandoned me. I think it's the latter.

I don't know what to do with that lost feeling. It's hard enough for me to have lost my perfect pitch. I'm still grieving that, even as I try to find the bright side of it, the chances for growth and transformation. Yeah. That was definitely grief. It still is.

I went to two musical events yesterday. In the first, the Inland Harmony Chorus gave a presentation on barbershop to a local high school class. In the second, I heard Doc D (Daryl Singleton) and Jacqui Wilson give a pub talk at Paradise Creek. Both events touched on the concept of tuning systems outside of twelve tone. Barbershop does this to amplify overtones. And many places outside of the US use alternate tuning systems that just don't sound right in twelve tone.

This had me reflecting on my loss of perfect pitch. While having it was very useful, it was also limiting in terms of what I'd enjoy listening to. I have to leave the room when microtonal jazz comes on. But perhaps this is a new direction in my musicality, and leaving the realm of perfect pitch could make it easier to tune in different systems.

I'm also terrified. In the presentation LuAnn said Deke Sharon has called barbershop the 'martial arts of a cappella'. That's starting to make sense to me. I thought slotting into this style would be easy, but now I'm not so sure. Being note-perfect memorized is now only step 1, where in so many groups I've been in before (including FFR) that was the end-goal for performance. I have a lot to learn about tuning different chords.

At least playing improvisational bass will give me some relief from that strict structure. As Pops Foster would say, "I just play any go-to-hell note".