Teh Dra-mah: Resolution [UF repost]
Mar. 15th, 2006 11:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
kyrasantae
As I left my dorm to head off to rehearsal, I ended up talking to another girl who sings in my section. I told her about how I had spent the last little while thinking of a "game plan" and slowly divulged what was on my mind, without naming any names.
She said, "is this person...blonde, and really b****y?" Me: "Yes, how did you know?" Her: "Well, you seem to be emanating an aura." Me: "How does my lack of description of this person's physical features emanate an aura of her appearance and attitude?!" [continue similar jokes here].
Turns out she knew exactly what I was talking about, since she was next to Critical Girl #1 during the rehearsal/concert on Saturday. So now I'm referring to the CGs as #1 and #2.
Anyway, when I got to the rehearsal room, #1 and #2 weren't there yet, so I dropped off my stuff at my usual seat. But then I had a different thought and asked one of the girls a couple of rows behind me if there were extra seats in her row, saying that I was "having a little trouble hearing anyone else around me from here" and wanted to move back, just for today (which is not a complete lie). There was, so I moved back.
Jackpot! Today, Bob worked on placement issues. He had each section line up at the front of the room as if it were a performance, then asked us to sing. He repeated the same thing with smaller groups, eventually single rows, then moved people around until the whole group blended together.
(People didn't know why I was so excited about this - no one wants to be singled out, even if it's being singled out in a small group - but you'll read why shortly.)
#2 (the attendance captain/page-turner) looked over her shoulder, through the gap in the heads behind her. Ever so briefly our eyes made contact, and I wondered if she was searching for me.
Bob asked the sopranos not to do so much vibrato, and it sounded good, but there was one girl who still did quite a lot. It was very distinctive, but tastefully done. It was definitely more than I could ever do. Bob didn't pick on her at all, but I could just imagine...what if this girl switched places with me; what if she was in my section instead? Imagine the outrage from #1 and #2!
For a moment the injustice intensified, but I started to have a bit of hope. Maybe I had nothing to fear from Bob.
Now it was the alto sections' turn. I was hyper from anticipation of Bob going through us row by row just as he had with the two soprano sections. He checked the whole section using a passage from the song that sparked the upset on Saturday, but glossed over my section (first altos) and only did some minor tweaking with the second altos.
Darn. Didn't get that moment to shine.
After some stupid comments caused by talking without thinking on my part, and a mostly uneventful rehearsal, I talked to Bob in the back room behind the rehearsal hall.
He sensed from my email [requesting the meeting] that I was upset about something, and I gave him the Readers' Digest version of the story. He reinforced the answer that he gave me on Saturday: I was blending fine, wasn't sticking out, etc., and said that #1 and #2 were just bullying me...after all, bullies win when the victim loses ground... Unfortunately I didn't mention the very genuine-sounding frustration that was in #1's voice when she criticized me on Saturday, and so in the back of my mind there is still a twinge of doubt as to this being the motive behind the situation.
He said that despite vibrato not necessarily being good and not really desired in choral singing (this I knew already), he wasn't going to enforce that because he knows that a significant number of us are not trained singers. He also recalled his daughter's experience (she's a professional singer) with a choir where vibrato was completely disallowed - how difficult and tiring she said it was to sing that way (I completely agree. I've been experimenting a little with it all day).
Anyway, his point was that there was nothing to worry about, that if anything, #1 and #2 had no right to judge how I was to be singing anyway, and that if it happened again, to tell them that I had talked to him about it and he had okayed it. I reiterated that Saturday was the third time they had given me the exact same criticism (with ever-increasing tone of frustration on their part in trying to get me to stop it, and ever-increasing tone of frustration on my part in trying to explain that it was out of my control and a necessity for my voice to perform); Bob considered that and asked me if it would be better if he emailed the two of them personally about it.
There's only 2 rehearsals and the peformance left in the season now, and to wait for it to happen again before I could tell them that it was okay with Bob meant that I may never have the chance to do so.. I gave him the two names and he said he'd deal with it.
Other installments:
