 |
|
|
|
|
 |
 |
|
||
 |
 |
|
||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
Music MagicApril 25, 2006 In my guitar practice I've been starting to learn songs. You think patting your head and rubbing your tummy is hard? Try forming chords with your left hand while picking (or even simply strumming) with your right, reading the chords and maybe the words off a piece of paper, and singing at the same time. My already huge admiration for performing singer-guitarists is getting more so. My awe of those who can do all this and also write great songs is already over the top. Speaking of which, I'm going up to Cambridge on Sunday to hear James Keelaghan at Club Passim. C'mon up! A few days ago -- all cocky because I could play and sing "The Veep Went Out in the Texas Light" (aka "The Fox"), "Oh Susannah," and (almost) "Blowin' in the Wind" -- I decided I was ready to start learning my first Keelaghan song. I picked "Rebecca's Lament," because I love it and its tempo is more reflective than rambunctious. (Rebecca is Rebecca Galloway; in the song she recalls watching her lover, Tecumseh, disappear into the woods for the last time. He'll die in battle. She'll be haunted forever, both understanding and not understanding why he had to leave.) Clinton Hammond, an Ontario singer-guitarist who posts regularly to the Keelaghan website, had performed the song himself: he generously furnished the lyrics and the chords (two versions), and I've been working on it ever since. Working into it is more like it. There are lots of chord changes, but I know all the chords. Forget Keelo's lovely finger-picking on the Small Rebellions CD: I'm doing one strum per chord most of the time while trying to remember the lyrics and synchronize them with the chords. After some experimenting I think I've found the right key for me to sing it in -- of course, since I was messing around with a capo for the first time and still haven't figured out what note is being produced when I press this string at that fret, I didn't know what key that was exactly until Clinton said it was C and told me how to deduce that for myself. OK, so I'm still fumbling the chords and forgetting the lyrics, but something's happening here. My voice and my guitar are filling the song, as if the song is a glove that's been lying rumpled on the shelf. Only the song is more than a glove, because it's shaping my voice -- a glove would have to be two sizes too small to do that to my hand. "Rebecca's Lament" isn't constricting my voice: it's coaxing it, stretching it, opening it up. Singing the words over and over again is slipping me into Rebecca, Keelaghan's Rebecca. An inflection changes, a slight emphasis appears: slowly, slowly, she's becoming my Rebecca. I've done this before, acting in plays: from the playwright's words I develop a character, so the playwright's words become the character's, and though Susanna doesn't become the character and the character isn't Susanna there's a deep and subtle interchange between them. It happens when I perform my own work; hell, it happens when I write fiction. But I've never done it with music. Or, rather, I've never done it one-on-one with music, only in choruses. Tremendous power can be generated chorally, and I've experienced it more than once, but the power of this one-on-one is different. Something Ursula K. Le Guin wrote about fantasy just popped into my head. I pulled the book off the shelf so I wouldn't botch it: "A fantasy is a journey. It is a journey into the subconscious mind, just as psychoanalysis is. Like psychoanalysis, it can be dangerous; and it will change you." (In "From Elfland to Poughkeepsie," in The Language of the Night.) Music is magic, and music is a journey -- it's leading me into my conscious, and my subconsious, and in the direction of the Squatters' Speakeasy.
|
|
|||
|
||||
|
||||
|
||||
 |
|
|||
 |
|
|||
Home - Writing - Editing - About Susanna - Bloggery - Articles - Poems - Contact Copyright ©
Susanna J. Sturgis. All rights reserved. |
||||