Life and music

Last time I made the mistake of writing this: 'I'm beginning to see the pattern in how I react and recover and know what to expect...' and (even bigger mistake) this: 'By a week after treatment day, I begin to feel a tiny bit more energy...'. I should have known better.

That was after Chemo 3. A week after Chemo 4, I felt so washed out I could barely get off the sofa, let alone go for a walk. Hence no blogs for the last month...

I've now had five (out of a probable 12) chemo treatments. Treatments are every fortnight so it is pretty relentless. I've already mentioned lots of side effects so I won't go through all that again. On the positive side, I've recently been doing some work from home for a couple of days each cycle which has been a huge boost both mentally and emotionally.

Another postive (and I hardly dare write this one down) is that the pain that's been getting gradually worse since last spring has started to recede. Still there but a lot better than it was. For now at least.

They are planning to do another scan in a few weeks' time to see what's happening and hopefully that will give a better picture of what's going on with the cancer in my pancreas and my liver. I'll keep you posted when I know what that shows.

So, on to today's blog.

This is number two in a series of blogs about things that have made me the person I am, the things I love and care about. It's a blog about music and mostly about singing. And just because it's handy to have a bit of a format, I thought I'd take the opportunity to share eight favourite pieces of music, in the style of Desert Island Discs. (And let's face it, I think my chances of being invited on the programme now are pretty slim...)

So here we go.

I grew up with music in the house. My parents and particularly my father listened to a lot of classical music. He had quite specific tastes - basically anything before about 1800, with a small exception blocked out for Vaughan Williams and a few similar English composers. 

In the 1970's 'early music' was enjoying a bit of a renaissance with groups like the Academy of Ancient Music starting to play on original instruments. My father had a nice collection of recorders (from a sopranino to a bass) and the story went that he had taught my mother to play the recorder while they were first getting to know each other. Apparently the recorder playing dropped away once they were engaged!

So my first piece of music was written in the early 1600's. I've sung it lots of times, and I still love it!

Byrd - Ave Verum Corpus

Neither of my parents were into 'pop' music (as they would have called it, complete with the inverted commas...). We sometimes went to amateur musicals, Gilbert and Sullivan operettas and of course church music was very much part of life (more of that later) but anything more modern than that, well it just didn't happen in our house.

So I have to admit that I really do prefer classical music. But of course, music of all sorts has been part of my life so there are lots of tracks which remind me of special times.

Track number two has to be the Beatles, there are so many of their songs I could have chosen, but this one was definitely part of the soundtrack to my teenage years...

Beatles - Let it be

Like lots of people, my musical education at school involved learning to play the recorder. Also like most people, I never managed to make it sound nice, but I made a reasonable job of it - until it was suggested I switched from the descant to the treble recorder. Now the treble has both different fingering to the descant and uses the bass clef rather than the treble clef (paradoxically). Between these changes, my nine or ten year old brain got completely scrambled and it took me years to work out the musical notation after that.

What I really wanted to learn to play was the flute. Flutes were beautiful, musical and a lot more glamorous than the recorder. It was around this time that James Galway got to no 1 in the UK charts with Annie's Song so that probably added to my enthusiasm. We went up to the Albert Hall to watch him at one of the Proms - he was such a great performer. And this piece was on one of the first classical LPs I owned.

Mozart's Concerto for flute and harp - James Galway and Marisa Robles

But this was the recession of the mid 1970s. I was at a private school so music lessons would have been extra and flutes were expensive. My parents procrastinated, I didn't push them, and the flute never happened. So I never learned an instrument and I've always regretted that in some ways.

But I did sing. My mother was very involved in our local church and singing was very much part of church life. I was also lucky enough to have an enthusiastic music teacher in the first few years of secondary school - Mrs Andrews - who started up a school choir and got us singing. 

Of course it all slipped a bit when I hit 13 and oh the embarrassment... I can clearly rememember instructing my mother NOT TO SING when sat next to me in church...

But sometime around the age of 16 or so, I must have decided that actually singing was OK. I did some school shows, and joined a small sixth form choir to do a couple of harmony pieces in a school Christmas concert. I then joined the church choir as well. Somewhere along the line, someone listened to my range and told me I was a soprano - and somehow having a nice label gave me more confidence.

Singing in a church choir is great training. You get through a lot of music, some of it easy and some more challenging. I joined too late to do the proper Royal School of Church Music training - I went straight into the adult section - but I still reckon that without that time, I would never have sorted out how to read music. 

So my next choice of music has to be something choral and churchy. And there is so much to choose from but I'm going for this piece which has to be one of the most beautiful pieces of music ever written.

Howells - A Spotless Rose

And before this blog gets even longer, I'm going to pop in track five which is just the most glorious thing to sing. Listen and sing along!

Handel - The Messiah, Hallelujah chorus

So ever since then, I have sung in some choir or other. Before you get any ideas, I should make it clear that I am a very ordinary singer. I'm not great at sight reading music. Like many other jobbing choir sopranos, I get a bit freaked out if we don't (a) have the tune or (b) have the top line. And I really don't have the volume or confidence to be 'solo material'. 

But I don't think any of that matters. I sing because I enjoy it. I had a few singing lessons with the wonderful Jill Meager (more below) in the 90's, and that taught me a lot and helped me make the most of my 'instrument'. But the joy of choral singing is that it is about working with others, learning something new, creating something which no one person could do alone. It's wonderfully physical and it involves being totally present in the moment (let your mind wander onto something else, and you'll miss that crucial entry!).

Last year was the first year I haven't sung with others on a regular basis and I missed it so much. And oh the joy of getting back together and singing again! The last time I was able to sing with others was open air carols outside a local nursing home just before Christmas (and just before chemo). It will happen again.

More music - I've chosen this one because Eddi Reader's singing is amazing, it's fantastic to dance to - and it reminds me of a very particular time in my life.

Fairground Attraction - Perfect

In 1993, I moved down to Southampton. And of course one of the first things I did was to find a local choir - the Hillside Singers - which was a seemingly small decision that ended up changing my life. Cutting a rather long story short, there was a cute tenor with a neat beard, a gorgeous voice and an appalling sense of humour...

My next piece means a lot to both of us - I do have a recording of Chris singing this, but it's not online so we'll have to put up with someone else... 

Leigh / Darion - The Impossible Dream (from the Man of La Manchua)

One of the joys of the last few years has been sharing music with our boys. I don't think I've managed to pass on my love of classical music but here's a piece we all love which brings back memories of holiday drives through the Pembrokeshire lanes... 

Elton John - I'm still standing

And so to my eighth piece of music, which I've chosen just because I love its optimism. 

Louis Armstrong - It's a beautiful world

Hillside Singers was a big part of Chris' and my life for some years, so I'm going to sneak in an extra piece of music which we first sang with them, and then revisited a couple of years ago at a concert to celebrate the 75th birthday of Jill Meager, the musical director / leader / inspiration for Hillside music. 

I can't quite put my finger on why I love this piece, I think it's the clarity and spareness of the melody, along with the rich imagery of the words.

Elgar - As torrents in summer

Jill has been an amazing ambassador for music and for singing all her life, and I still think about all the things I learned from her. (When you need to sing high, approach the note from above; To keep a piece moving, pretend to get faster!)

There were occasions when we approached a performance, and the music was perhaps still a little bit scrappy. Perhaps some of us weren't really confident about our parts, and there those sections where you couldn't quite rely on the tenor entry... and Jill would look at us all firmly, and then remind us: 'Forget about the notes, sing the music.'

I think that's good advice for life too.

This blog is dedicated to all the people I have sung with - too many to name individually, you know who you are - but I should mention St Michael's Camberley church choir, Fitzwilliam Chapel choir, the Ichthyan Singers (aka Fish), the Granta Singers, Hillside Singers and All Hallows Whitchurch church choir.