As far as I can remember, this week has all been about memory. Over the weekend my trusted MacBook instructed me to restart (the machine not me...one day though, Apple..one day). What followed is best summed up by an online messageboarder as "oh you mean..the gray (sic) screen of death?". Fine, I thought, I have an external back-up disc so I'll just have to fork out for a repair or possibly a new machine, thank god I backed it all up....in...F*CK...January!! Yes, three months of .excel tax receipts ready for my June VAT return (in sterling and euros this quarter) into the ether...6 months of emails (deleted from the hotmail server of course) up the spout and who knows what else...probably just a couple of useless apps if I'm lucky.
Posting such distress to Facebook is the new form of catharsis and within a few minutes messages of goodwill, support and helpful advice would pour in to cleanse the rotten Apple. So given this opportunity I'd like to thank those of you who kindly pointed me in the direction of data recovery services or shared their own woes from similar failures, and to those of you who posted incredibly insightful advice (you know who you are) such as "I use an online backup service so all my data is fine" and "in future I'd back up your stuff just before your laptop dies" I offer an attentive discourse on the international language of the middle finger, gratis.
It's a good thing then that Steve Jobs doesn't do operas. Memory is one of the highest hurdles the singer has to jump and it's fascinating to discover over time how one's brain actually works to compute the mass of notes and words you come up against in any career. There are huge pitfalls.
Take this week for instance. On Saturday myself and the rest of the Midsummer Night's Dream cast will slip back into the familiar costumes and onto the well-trod boards of the stage at ENO and repeat a show we've done 5 times already and countless times in the rehearsal room over the past 2 months. Easy. However it will have been over a week since we last did this and though that doesn't sound long enough to forget it (it's not) it is just long enough for our brains to have begun to erase the "auto-pilot" which is the save-all resort in moments of memory-lapse panic. Day-to-day you can trust your onboard RAM to kick in and let you concentrate on the performance for the simple reason that you know and trust that you'll have the music and words on the tip of your tongue. But leave a week long gap and the post-it note always pops up as you walk onto the scene, reading "why the hell do you think you can trust your memory, it's been a week....a WEEK...you've done other stuff....I'm going to delete whole words from phrases....good luck... off you go!" I find in these situations to do what you'd do with your laptop and just put it to sleep or press restart. 99% of the time when it comes back on it'll have everything there ready to fire-up. So you tell your inner monologue to bugger off and stop concentrating on trying to remember and instead give in to trust. Failing that you make it all up in the most convincing manner you can.
Plenty of stories abound of such last minute brain-freezes. Some of them more famous than others and knowing my memory I'm about to make most of the details up. Peter Pears features in several such tales of which I can remember only a couple. At the beginning of Act 2 in Death in Venice he came to the line "So it has come to this, I can find no better description of my state than the hackneyed words 'I love you'", except all that came out instead of 'I love you' were prehistoric grunts. The other is one of the best and involves Britten's The Burning Firey Furnace. The correct line is "come fill up your goblets" whereas Pears sang "come gob up your fillets". Countertenor James Bowman is said to have mastered the art of spontaneously re-writing a libretto upon realising he had forgotten to carry with him the crucial prop, a dagger: "With this....er..FIST...I thee kill". Or something like that.
I too have experienced hideous moments of memory lapse and it's only fair to share them now. Both curiously enough happened in Monteverdi operas. I accept all responsibility for reordering the stanzas of Human Frailty's opening prologue in Il Ritorno d'Ulisse in Patria but can't vouch for why the conductor felt the need to join me in a surprise duet from the pit, with him singing the correct words. It is worth pointing out too (I'm offloading the blame now..) that this performance had come at the end of a month long break during which most of the cast had gone about their ordinary lives and in many cases (myself included) rehearsed and performed entire other operas in the meantime. My other Monteverdi fail was in fact more embarrassing because it made me laugh and was in front of an audience of just 25 people at the Handel House Museum (before you titter, that is sell out capacity). Ottone's beautiful and lengthy return home to Poppea that opens L'incoronazione di Poppea is a useful recital choice for any countertenor. There are good tunes, lots of contrasting moods, plenty of scope for dramatic exploration and of course this composer is revered for his exemplary and masterful marriage of text and music. Half way through, the scene breaks away from the mellifluous melodies to a more intense and drier, almost spoken recitative; this is where it gets particularly hard, especially for the non-native speaker. I was doing fine....stuttering my way through as I discovered the two sleeping soldiers and began to unravel the sordid bed hopping of Nero and Poppea when I got stuck...as if burdened by a stammer. I couldn't for the life of me get the word out. "E in .......aghhh......". The word in question was "grembo" so perhaps it is forgivable that eventually my diaphragm kicked in and sent flying from my mouth "quimbo". Yes, 'QUIMBO'. A confluence, my brain and funny bone told me at the time, of 'quim' and 'rambo'. MORTAL COSA SON IO, FATTURA HUMANA.
Learning music is one side of the coin. Remembering it is the other. And I have learned to respect that other side. Why was it for example, that after singing in a college choir for 9 years of my life during which I repeated some of the repertoire nigh on 200 times or so am I completely unable to sing any of it for memory, yet within 6 weeks of picking up an opera aria I can stand in front of 2000 people sing it and happily prance around in a silly costume at the same time? The pin dropped last year - it was just a case of dealing with two very different parts of my brain. With the music in front of me, or even a score just floating close by I was able to claw my way through most familiar songs, anthems, arias etc and give something of a convincing performance. Throw the notes out of the window and I became a quivering wreck. And that's because the brain used the printed music as its trigger. Try it sometime. If you've never sung Messiah "off-copy" but have performed it dozens of times the first time without music is a very strange feeling. We rely on the sign-posts even though the music is fully absorbed. These sign-posts however don't have to be the musical score and once you accept this you can start to really improve your memorising.
Without conscious acknowledgment most opera singers rely on the blocking in a scene to trigger their musical memory and eventually it becomes second nature. That's why a sitzprobe after 5 weeks of acting rehearsals feels so foreign. Suddenly the music is all alone again and your body and brain goes into some sort of quizzical overdrive.
Song recitals present an ideal opportunity to investigate how the brain takes in music. Gone are the supportive splints of the opera stage with it's props, actions and not forgetting other singers to prompt the memory. Last year I was in the rare position of doing an entire recital with just a piano. (Baroque repertoire lends itself to ensemble based recitals more often than not which relaxes the tension a great deal and often eliminates the priority of memorising music...for some reason...). I had a handful of English song to learn and 5 or so weeks to get it into the grey matter. All this whilst away from home rehearsing a Handel opera in which I was a central character with little time off during the day. I thought about how I had attempted and failed to memorise songs before. Often I'd just sing them through and with the aid of repetition they'd eventually fall into place. But the quimbo episode had shown me different. The problem with this was that I was always starting with the familiar opening and after singing through the song a few times I had convinced myself that I knew it better. What I was actually doing was repeating the same pattern of 'familiar tune and words..to...less familiar tune and words". Anyone who has played the shopping-list-alphabet-game knows that the longer the game goes on the harder it gets to remember what the previous player just listed, as it will be the final letter you get to before you play your next hand. If you started with their recent addition to the shopping list then it would be far too easy as you'd constantly be traveling towards the known. Ah-ha, I thought.
By patiently (and patience is the key here as it takes a while) commencing with the final comprehensible line of text and music and adding each time the line preceding it I was teaching my brain, in fact more directly my memory, the song from the 'newest information' to the 'known information'. It was a win win situation. The further I got away from the final bar the easier it became as each sing-through involved sailing into increasingly familiar waters. Indeed each bar of music became a content and calming waypoint on the voyage towards the home port at the final phrase. Once I'd completed this exercise I just had to keep repeating the song parrot-fashion as I had done before so as to keenly etch the pattern I had just memorised and lock it away. This method also has the added bonus that the sections that you have just committed to memory are always repeated first and it is this repetition that helps to cement the brain cells. A song with say 40 phrases to learn means that the final phrase has been sung 40 times and the first phrase only once in the course of the exercise, which whilst it sounds no better than starting at the beginning, is actually a more reassuring way to learn it as the sign-posts gather in familiarity as you progress and they serve to quiesce the torrid sub-conscious monologue that would otherwise be barking at you, "you don't know it, you don't know it". Instead it gently whispers, "ahh..you've done this pharase 35 times at least, and now this one 36 times..ahh" and so on.
It seems to work for me. So far. I've just done this with Vaughan-Williams' 'Watermill" which is something of a tongue-twister. You can hear the results on the radio next month if you like, though now I've mentioned it it'll be jinxed. Don't bother.
Memory is a wild beast but you have to tame it and learn how to employ it. Like singing itself the only secrets are those of patience and trust in oneself. Without sounding too much like some Buddist Yogi there's a grain of truth here, but none of it goes the distance if you forget one elementary procedure. That being to turn up. I kid you not, I heard recently of a singer who enjoyed a particularly sociable and hearty lunch after a satisfying morning's rehearsal with his colleagues. Farewells and see-you-laters were exchanged as always and the afternoon was spent making his way contentedly home on the soonest flight back, safe in the knowledge that things had gone decidedly well, his voice was in good trim, the conductor was pleased and everyone seemed at ease. Leisurely tucking into his supper that night he reflected on the good fortune he had found in his career as an international singer, little realising that as he chewed gently on his steak and drifted up the stairs for a well deserved kip the very concert hall he had been rehearsing in that very morning was slowly but surely filling up with an audience teeming with anticipation for his performance.
Humans too have major hard disc failures.
A Prayer.
Our Hard Drive Data-Recovery Agency,
Who art in Ealing W5,
Hallowed be thy name.
Thy laboratories come.
Thy reparing be done,
With a 95% success rate as it is on your website.
Give us this day our daily emails,
and forgive us thy lack of back-up,
As we forgive those at the Genius Bar who refused to help,
And lead us not into temptation to make up my lost account figures,
But deliver us from my slow Mac G5 temporary solution.
For thine is the costliest at £300,
the power and the glory,
for recovering all my data for ever and ever,
Amen.
No comments:
Post a Comment