maybe mezzo

  There seems to be an slow underlying message as we navigate through this crisis which is built on the old adage of 'carry on regardless' and 'best foot forward' which on the surface seems to be the only way to go. In my job as a singing teacher however, this is proving to be a serious challenge and one for which I am not sure I am best equipped.  One day in March, like every other teacher, I was working in a school, preparing my students for their high level singing grade exams (due the next day as it happened); the next day all that was cancelled and I was plunged into the world of online teaching and the now extremely well known Zoom platform. In the spirit mentioned above, I embraced the technology and immediately understood there was a serious adaptation to be made due to latency or time lag. Again, I adapted and found ways around dealing with this along with a seemingly endless round of creating backing tracks, sending pdf music scores, organising timetables and ...

In huggier times, funnily enough in Durham! I have noticed that when major events happen in my life, currently the Coronavirus epidemic, my first reaction is to stop and be still. I wait quietly and try and hear something. It's as if I am listening for a signal. When I look back in my life, I have always done it. I do it even more when surrounded by noise. When Princess Diana died I was in London the day after and I walked to Buckingham Palace where although there were crowds of people, there was an eerie silence; everybody lost in their own thoughts. And that's a phrase we use isn't it?  We are all silenced by events that are devastating - think 9/11 - and then the noise comes as we try and make sense of it.  Is that inner quiet space the sound of us meeting ourselves? It must be the moment where we try and process the enormity of the impact and work out how we proceed, if it is safe to do so, what the cost might be. It is probably textbook psychology. The current crisis h...

I asked AOTOS member Anne-Marie Czajkowski  to share her expertise on mindfulness for us here as many of us work out how to move our teaching forward or whether to bother and work out the implications.  Mindfulness for Singers I’ve recently completed my PhD studying the effects of mindfulness on singers. I’ve run several studies teaching mindfulness to singing students which complement their normal singing tuition and the results have been overwhelmingly positive. Participants found doing 10 mins mindfulness before singing lessons, practice and performances helped them to learn singing technique more deeply, develop more efficient and effective practice, helped them with performance anxiety, and brought them into the present moment on stage allowing them to be more creative and responsive.  Anyone who has seen my FB posts knows that I’ve found teaching online really tough over the past week. I’ve felt quite stressed that I wouldn’t be good enou...

When a colleague dies This week I was faced with the sudden and unexpected death of a fellow professional from my workplace and it has been very thought provoking for many of us.  The death of professional colleague has all the feelings of the death of a family member, yet it is almost as if you haven't earned the right to grieve. You see this person on a regular basis, have chats, laugh about family or work situations; talk about home life; ask them for their advice and vice versa and gradually build up a relationship with them that is unique. Yet, you may not be a close friend, you may not know their partners or children, you may not go for a drink with them after work. The working colleague relationship is built on respect, often common goals working in the same situation and similar attitudes, hopefully alongside a shared sense of humour. In so many ways they inhabit your working day, so it feels like a huge difference when they are no longer there. As in this case,...

Having been at dinner over at Eton College the other night, it was interesting to see the responce as we all came around the corridor to be confronted by this painting of the brothers and to reflect on the recent news.   It seems to me that Harry was looking for a way out and Meghan became his ticket to do so. I always said that as an independent woman, already in her mid 30s, so very used to leading her own life, she was never going to find it easy to curtail her freedom either physically or metaphorically. I watched her style in clothing change and there was one moment when I looked at her outfit and said she had been 'royal-fied' - it was never going to look awful because she is a beautiful woman, but it didn't suit her and she looked rather trussed up. Being told what you can't do all the time must be stultifying and suffocating. However much she might have been going to modernise the royal family, it was never going to be enough for a 21st century fashionable woma...

I think I would have fared better as a teenager today, despite the social media pressures, than I did in the 1970s. Back then, parent power ruled and you needed to be quite 'hard' to rebel. I wasn't yet made of rebellious material. I look back at what ought to have been a time of blossoming and realise how stunted I was in so many ways. I gave the impression of being confident but it was my act of swimming rather than drowning. I had to be that way in our house. A strong mother who was living out her wishes through her daughter and a weak father who did anything for a quiet life. They kind of waited to see what each day had to bring instead of steering the day to suit them. That is of course easy to say from this distance and with the knowledge I have now, and maybe that was how everybody lived. But goodness me, the 60s were still ringing in their ears! And we were on Merseyside where it really was happening!  Oh how I would have loved the Internet then to get inspira...