musical ramble

So I'm going to rant a little about singing. I have next to no formal musical training, so those who do (ipanicked, rottenfruit, drkeys, raithen's sister, and any of the rest of you) are encouraged to avert their eyes and/or poke holes in the following. But I've sung in several choirs, I am an enthusiastic singer-along to the radio, and I know what I like, dammit. So.

Performances of songs, it seems to me, can be roughly divided into three (maybe four) categories:

1. Easy songs made to sound easy.
Lots of pop music is like this. Some of it can be fantastic (many folk songs fall in this category). I enjoy singing along to an easy song as much as the next girl. If the singer has a spectacular voice, this is a definite plus, but easy songs can also show off pleasant-voiced singers with a limited range, and that's fine. Performances in this category are not trying to be something they're not.

2a. Hard songs made to sound hard.

2b. Easy songs made to sound hard.
Anyone can do either of these. Pop "divas" do this a lot -- Celine Dion and Whitney Houston, for instance, come to mind. They never quite let you forget how much work they're putting into the song. (Whether the song sounds good is another question -- Gerard Butler as the Phantom of the Opera, I'm lookin' at you. I've seen a trailer for the Phantom, which looks quite sumptuous, but the line

Let your soul take you where you long to... BEEE!

made me flinch back in my seat. Not his fault, mind you -- I gather he's never sung before. But it's a problem.)

There is certainly a place for virtuoso singing that doesn't make a secret of how difficult the song is (as a random example, the bass soloist's rendition of "The Trumpet Shall Sound" at my mother's choir's performance of the Messiah). So category 2a gets a conditional bye from me. I reserve a special place in Heck, though, for many, many performances in 2b, good singers overplaying a song (hard or easy) to show off. And in this category I am placing those responsible for two renditions I recently heard of "O Holy Night": Stevie Wonder and whoever got the nod for the CBC's broadcast on Christmas Day. Both of them managed to make the chorus sound something like this:

Fall on your knees!
Oh hear how great my voice is!
My voice divine, my voice, listen to me
I'm working hard, so hear
My voice divine!

And that's just wrong. It's a beautiful carol and, yes, difficult to sing, but it can show off a voice very well without, as it were, showing off. It has plenty of drama all on its own -- there's no need to add pounds of vibrato and overplay the dynamics and generally marzipan it up. Ugh. I would much prefer it to fall in the last category:

3. Hard songs made to sound easy.
This is the singing I admire the most. Kirsty MacColl and Warren Zevon, my current obsessions, share this quality: incredible voices that sneak up on you by making you think "Hey, I could do that." Until you try. (I grant you that my definition of "hard" is entirely subjective and arbitrary and consists of "I tried to sing it, and found it difficult." It's as good a working definition as I've been able to come up with, though, and I'm going to keep it.) There are others: off the top of my head, Ella Fitzgerald, Dusty Springfield, Dolly Parton (the reader will kindly make a hex sign here to ward off harm from the only living person in this list) all put a hell of a lot of effort into making their singing sound effortless.

And that, to me, is the real secret of virtuosity.

(no subject)

via thespian: some so-called Christians really need to be sent to stand in the corner for a while until they find a clue.

tsunami help

From the Globe and elsewhere, Canadian contact info for some of the groups organizing aid for victims of the disaster:

Canadian Red Cross: 1-800-418-1111

Unicef Canada: 1-877-955-3111
or by mail at UNICEF Canada, 2200 Yonge Street, Suite 1100, Toronto, ON, M4S 2C6

Oxfam Canada: 1-800-466-9326

Care Canada: 1-800-267-5232

World Vision: 1-800-268-5528

The Canadian Catholic Organization for Development and Peace: 1-888-664-3387
or cheque payable to Development and Peace, marked for tidal wave disaster mailed to Development and Peace, 5633 Sherbrooke St. East, Montreal, H1N 1A3

Medecins Sans Frontieres / Doctors Without Borders: 1-888-392-0392
or by mail to: Doctors Without Borders, 720 Spadina Avenue, Toronto, ON M5S 2T9

The High Commission of the Democratic Socialist Republic of Sri Lanka: 1-613-233-8449 (and here's hoping the government and the Tamils can put their differences aside)

The Mennonite Central Committee: 1-888-622-6337

gristmill_rss recommends donating directly to Sarvodaya, a Sri Lankan grassroots development movement. The volunteer who suggested this said: "As you may know, while the international donor organizations provide much-needed material assistance, they rely on organizations like Sarvodaya to actually distribute this aid to the people who need it. The list of organizations that rely on Sarvodaya's thousands of volunteers reads like a who's who of the development world. I have seen Sarvodaya workers distributing aid from UNICEF to poor villagers in a village that the Sri Lankan government didn't even know existed. And, most importantly, Sarvodaya delivers assistance in Sinhalese, Tamil, Muslim and Christian communities." Here's what they're doing to help. They are now taking donations by Visa and Mastercard. If you're in the U.S. and want a tax receipt, you can also donate to Sarvodaya U.S.A. (that's a really old web page! yikes!) via PayPal, or send a cheque to 5716 Manchester Avenue #3, Los Angeles, CA 90045.

And finally, the SEA-EAT blog.

Thanks to brisingamen for the inspiration and the last link (she also has lots of useful info, especially for those in the UK), and this post on toronto for the additional info.