Jagged Little Line

A letter tracing exercise.

Maybe I heard it last night. Singing “And All That Jazz” for the millionth time. The way my voice is rich and characterful and how it now has confidence in this song – knows it inside out – but is still so rough and unpracticed around the edges. Like there’s a narrow passage down which the notes run, and although my voice follows that passage pretty well now, instead of drawing a smooth, flowing, exact and practiced line, it's like a child or someone with fine motor control problems attempting it. Almost all within the bounds, but shaky and jagged and unsure, too textured and at times a little short of the mark. It made me sad in a way, because I’d hoped confidence was more (all) of my issue, and once I “broke through” that, the voice would follow. But I can’t escape the fact that I have a very untrained sounding voice. So not only am I missing the confidence, I’m also missing all the hard yards that go into molding a trained voice. Like the many hours that you spend writing out letter forms so your hand can draw that confident, smooth, cursive line through the writing exercise. I may one day soon have a voice with depth and character and confidence, but that trained smoothness won’t manifest through my intent alone. I was not one of the lucky ones born with a silky smooth understanding of pitch, or vocal cords destined to ring as clear as bells.

So I'm going to do a singing course. I kind of promised myself to do it a while back when I joined the choir. I wanted to do something more intensive and structured, and that was designed more for results and less for casual enjoyment. I also wanted to study where some of the choirmasters worked because they were just really good teachers, and I wanted to learn in the place that engaged such people. At the time the short courses had just finished up for the year, but now the first ones for the new year have just taken early-bird enrollments. So I paid my money, and for eight weeks in February/March I will be having regular instruction. I hope it helps. I hope I have the emotional strength to get through it without making a fool of myself or quitting.

P.S. I printed out that letter tracing exercise from a school worksheets website, as I wanted something to bring to life the image I had in my head about learning to write. I had to do it three times, and ended up doing it on the floor with the marker held in my right toes because even my ‘fake bad skills’ with either hand were too deliberate looking. Hahaha. Omen?