NOTES
by Mark Dow

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“Don’t sing so carefully,” she said.
Renée Fleming said. Instead
of worrying about the pitch
make one direct line out. She said
someone said the Handel’s “the most
difficult

A R I A

E V E R

written”
and told the mezzo to measure breath
and phrase length together. Forty-nine
hours before the open master class I’d
gone with my mother to Carnegie Hall
(practice) to hear The Creation (Haydn),
based in part on a translation into English
of a German translation from the English
of Milton. In the 1798 program
Haydn asked that for continuity’s
sake there be no applause between
movements, but there was. Tonight’s
notes quote Richard Kramer on
“the sound that was not yet music...
before language and reason recognize
one another.” Raw materials without
organizing principle were there. It all
belongs here. That same night
I gave my mom, who taught me how
to talk and feel, a book I’d just read
on the origins of language because
she’d recently wondered

A L O U D

A B O U T

that and
I wanted us to have read the same thing. “I just
want to hear the connection to the breath a
little more,” Fleming said. She used to think
“it won’t really be impressive unless it’s impossible
to sing,” but not anymore, not exactly. “Frankly,
if you miss a few notes it’s going to be
more interesting to us than if it’s perfect.”

Open up the sound, she told a soprano a little later.
Imagine the tone on a cushion of air as if you
have no neck, she said. She said, in warm-up make
“any sound to get things loose.” The ee sound is EZ
and “focuses your voice.” ah is harder. Bridge them:
sing ee in the ah position, ah in the ee,

A N D

S O

O N

The HOT DOG I’d WOLF’d DOWN before the class began
began repeating on me here. “In the crescendo
open
up the
vowels.”

She told a tenor his Strauss was “disembodied.”
In the old days they resisted the notion your voice
comes from your body but we see things differently.
In Capriccio: A Conversation Piece for Music
suitors argue whether words or music supersede.
One sets the other's sonnet to a tune, the second
complains the first fractures the sense of it, and
the Countess whom they’re fighting for listens.
“Do not underestimate the charm we find in you
while you’re conversing without the restrictions of
metric form,“ she says or sings. “All is confusion;
words are singing, singing speaks.” Strauss used
a sonnet by Pierre de Ronsard, de-translated here:

Not a soul could come between us,
No way, baby, only you
Could tear me up the way you do,
And I mean no one. Even Venus.
Your eyes, and yes, it’s so cliché,
One wink’ll make me come undone,
The twinkle restore me. It’s that sudden
And up to you. I have no say.
(The final sestet gets too dense
With images that make no sense.)

Men tend to rely too heavily on pressure, Fleming told him.
Don’t be overly “fascinated with the pronunciation of the words,”
as she herself once was. Too “art-songy,” she said. “Just say it.”

“Some aspects of my singing took ten years to fully gasp —
grasp,“ she said, replacing the dropped consonant without
comment. “I wrestle with my voice every single day....
When you’re really doing well you don’t even
think you’re singing anymore.”

“Don’t sing so carefully,” she said,
her trimeter natural as air.

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Author’s Note: Mark Dow is the author of Plain Talk Rising (poems), American Gulag: Inside U.S. Immigration Prisons, and the Mudlark Chap Feedback and Other Conversation Poems (2015).

NOTES by Mark Dow

NOTES
by Mark Dow