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When I'm at home in the warm, working on writing, and thinking about how immensely boring the subway ride to the Upper West is, I forget just how tremendously satisfying teaching is. So I think poo, I'm teaching tonight, don't wanna go out, poo, but of course I have to, this is life when you have jobs, and once we get started I remember oh right, I like teaching.
My Monday-Thursday grown-up student is coming along nicely. We're working more on singing technique than trop; her problem is not so much figuring out how to use trop, but how to sing it in tune. A long long time ago, when I was young enough that singing lessons came into the parental budget,* my singing teacher used a lot of physical metaphors to get me singing properly - things like miming throwing a ball or stretching elastic, ha-mevin yavin - and I'm finding that they work a treat with this student. I tried them with my Sunday-Wednesday bat mitzvah student, and she didn't really take to them, which makes me think that possibly one needs to be grown-up before the benefits overcome the embarrassing dorky feeling.
It's way way cool how you can sing a phrase that goes E-D-E way out of tune if you think about it as three separate notes, but completely in tune by picturing it as a long straight thing with a wiggle in it. Same with merkha tevir, which in my mind is like nothing so much as someone slipping on a banana skin, it leaps up and then falls into a descending legato curve which finishes by righting itself to its starting position.
Nice.
* Thank you, parents.
My Monday-Thursday grown-up student is coming along nicely. We're working more on singing technique than trop; her problem is not so much figuring out how to use trop, but how to sing it in tune. A long long time ago, when I was young enough that singing lessons came into the parental budget,* my singing teacher used a lot of physical metaphors to get me singing properly - things like miming throwing a ball or stretching elastic, ha-mevin yavin - and I'm finding that they work a treat with this student. I tried them with my Sunday-Wednesday bat mitzvah student, and she didn't really take to them, which makes me think that possibly one needs to be grown-up before the benefits overcome the embarrassing dorky feeling.
It's way way cool how you can sing a phrase that goes E-D-E way out of tune if you think about it as three separate notes, but completely in tune by picturing it as a long straight thing with a wiggle in it. Same with merkha tevir, which in my mind is like nothing so much as someone slipping on a banana skin, it leaps up and then falls into a descending legato curve which finishes by righting itself to its starting position.
Nice.
* Thank you, parents.