A couple of months ago I fulfilled a dream I had harboured for the better part of two decades and decided to take singing lessons. Truth be told, I would not have started if I hadn’t felt a slight twinge of panic every time I thought about my upcoming choir audition and had not met a singer when a friend took me to a concert (as you can see, sometimes things just happen in my life). Also, as luck would have it, the singer is fluent in German so I knew that if it all went wrong, my German swearing (which I insist is a stress response rather than just bad manners) would not fall on deaf ears.
I approached my singing project the way I approach all new projects: with an amount of enthusiasm that borders on delusion and the firm conviction that I can do everything as long as I try long and hard enough. Thus, when I had my first singing lesson and sounded like the sad offspring of an unhealthy union between a pigeon and a Theremin, the only thing I thought was, ‘Gosh, I really do sound a bit rusty. I need to do some work.’ (Or rather, what I thought was, ‘Oida, I kling ja ur scheiße! I muaß echt üben!’) However, although I take great pride in the fact that I often have the right thoughts, I have to admit that my thoughts do not always translate into action. Before I knew it, weeks had gone by and I still sounded like something you could put on a tape to drive away burglars and the occasional rodent, it was clear I needed to up the pressure. I decided to sign up for an ABRSM exam.
‘You do know that it takes a lot of time to prepare for an exam’, my teacher said when I told her about it. There was a hint of a frown on her face. I know that frown. It’s the one people use when they are unsure if I am arrogant or stupid. ‘I know it’s a lot of work’, I answered, somewhat upset that she could not see that I was both. ‘Fine’, she said, ‘let’s do some warmup then’. She was going to learn. And to her credit, she did not let me down. My teacher supported me the day I burst into tears while singing Grieg’s ‘Ich liebe dich’ (so much for me claiming not to be an emotional person) as well as the many days I nearly threw up (Nerves? Bad technique? I guess we’ll never know). She supported me until I could reasonably pretend to be ‘A little bit in love’ and until ‘Star vicino’ to my loved one was the best thing since the invention of sliced bread. She showed me how to hold my hands without giving the impression that I was suffering from period cramps and how to stand in a way that did not give the impression that I was learning to be walk again after two years in a coma.
On the day of my exam, I was surprisingly calm. In fact, I was so calm that I failed to double-check the address and ended up in the wrong place, which was fortunately close to the place where I was supposed to be so that I got there only 7 minutes and 2 dangerous road crossings later than I had anticipated. I remember preciously little about the exam itself other than that I briefly panicked when the examiners asked me if I wanted to try out the room for acoustics. To be clear here, I have ONE way of singing and was sure that flexibility would not be required before Grade 6. After that, I calmly and very happily made my way through the accompanied pieces, only changed keys once during the unaccompanied song and still had enough headspace to note that the trainee examiner was really cute. I am afraid I screwed my chances with him during sight-singing, when what I sang bore so little resemblance to what was printed on the page that he did not stand the slightest chance of accompanying me. What a pity. He didn’t even frown at me. He would have made an excellent husband.
The results came through very quickly and – believe it or not – in spite of my improvisational sight-singing I got a merit. That made me happy and sad in equal measure. It made me sad because studying comes to me so easily that anything less than a distinction disappoints me and happy because I had done the undoable. Not only had I fulfilled a dream of two decades and started on those singing lessons, but that I had made my way through the exam with enough grace to convince the examiners that I was worthy of getting a certificate. On top of that, I had done all this without ever resorting to using those German swearwords. And that can be said to be the biggest miracle of all.
