Voice workshop

Now I am back performing a bit more often - I have been benefitting from some voice coaching in various settings. But I thought I would take this a bit further and actually work on my singing voice too. So I have joined a traditional song workshop with Scott Murray the folk singer.

This is great for a number of reasons.

1. First I love singing. I like singing all the parts from tenor - and I do mean tenor - up to soprano - when did that happen? I never used to be able to sing high but now everyone around me has got lower in voice apparently!
   
2. Secondly we are allowed to improvise. Like in a folk club, the singers I am working with join in and harmonise as soon as they get the tune - often after the first few bars. So I am developing harmonies too - I found myself adding parts to the power ballads CD I had in the car. A first. The Scorpions never sounded so good!
   
3. Thirdly we stand in a circle and eventually we are doing a concert. So, Eye contact. Body Language. Standing up straight. All valuable.
   
4. But finally and best of all the songs are fab, rude and sad, pretty and intricate and powerful, and very often in wonderful rich Scots.

O Willie brew'd a peck o' maut,
And Rob and Allen cam to see;
Three blyther hearts, that lee-lang night,
Ye wadna found in Christendie.

We are na fou, we're nae that fou,
But just a drappie in our ee;
The cock may craw, the day may daw
And aye we'll taste the barley bree.

(extract from Robert Burns Willie brew'd a peck o' maut)

More about some of the songs we are singing here http://www.riddellfiddles.co.uk/singing.htm and about Scott Murray here http://www.scottmurraysongs.co.uk/current/current-news-and-events/ and Robbie Coltrane reads Burns' poem here http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/robertburns/works/willie_brewd_a_peck_o_maut/

The politics of poetry June 20th 2014 Ayr, Scotland

Burns, Jamaica and the Scottish slave trade.

Linton Kwesi Jones and Kevin Williamson read their own work and explore Robert Burns' response to the Scottish slave trade in Jamaica in poetry.

This event is at Alloway at Burns' home and it is free but you need to book tickets.

You can find out more here https://www.facebook.com/events/557292754387734/?ref_dashboard_filter=upcoming, book tickets here http://scottishpenallowayevent.brownpapertickets.com/ and more about Burns' cottage here http://www.burnsmuseum.org.uk/.

Burns windows project in action

Some great photos of the poems now in the windows.

Hugh Bryden has more information here for you to visit virtually https://en-gb.facebook.com/BurnsWindowsProject  and here http://www.hughbryden.com/ or maybe you can visit the Burns pubs in Dumfries, Scotland for real and take a glass in memory before or on the 25th January 2014.

Burns Window Project

With just six days to go until Burns Night, the Burns Window Project has got poems from Scotland, England and Ireland, but still plenty of windows to fill.

Poets should write their poem in a bold black pen onto an A4 sheet of paper, remembering that most of the poems will be read from several feet away.

• Scan
• Save as a jpeg
• Mail to roncadorapress at gmail.com

Poems should be the poet’s own work, written by them and signed. Deadline is Monday 13th January. They will be displayed as Windows for Burns Night 2014 project from January 17th to February 17th in The Globe Inn, The Coach and Horses and the Robert Burns House Museum in Dumfries.

You can also buy a pamphlet featuring poems from last year’s windows on sale during this year’s event.

More information available here https://www.facebook.com/BurnsWindowsProject

How drunk is the ancient mariner?

The opening of A drunk man looks at a thistle Hugh MacDiarmid's 1926 poem

I amna fou' sae muckle as tired - deid dune.

It's gey and hard wark coupin' gless for gless

Wi' Cruivie and Gilsanquhar and the like,

And I'm no' juist as bauld as aince I wes.

invites the reader to expect a poem in the tradition of Scots drinking stories. It is a witty playful start - the speaker is worn out by lifting the glass to keep up with his drinking companions and he is not as bold as he once was. This reader thought of Robert Burns' 1791 Tam o' Shanter - another drinker whose pleasure is offset by the subconscious knowledge of the long Scots miles between himself and home and his surly spouse...

When chapman billies leave the street,

And drouthy neibors, neibors, meet;

As market days are wearing late,

And folk begin to tak the gate,

While we sit bousing at the nappy,

An' getting fou and unco happy,

We think na on the lang Scots miles,

The mosses, waters, slaps and stiles,

That lie between us and our hame,

Where sits our sulky, sullen dame,

Gathering her brows like gathering storm,

Nursing her wrath to keep it warm.

But at this point said reader - me - went off on a total tangent and thought about the start of the ancient mariner - all sailors love to drink - and how he grabs the wedding guest and won't let him get on because he is telling him an endless story; becoming in many ways himself the albatross around the wedding guest's neck.

Would Coleridge have known of Burns' work? And the usefulness of giving a poem a mischieviously drunken narrator or protagonist - a fabliau touch - that frees up the subject matter. He after all is more known for Kubla Khan like visions. Well first look at the dates. Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote The Ancient Mariner as part of the Lyrical Ballads between 1797 and 1798. Just after Burns's death. Burns (1759 - 1796) was a little older than Coleridge 1772 – 1834 but not much. Burns' had been lauded as a poet a good ten years before that. And his subject matter, language, form and politics all spoke deeply to Coleridge.

Like MacDiarmid, Coleridge is then able to subvert expectations of where a drinking narrator will take you.

Coleridge himself explains:

The thought suggested itself (to which of us I do not recollect) that a series of poems might be composed of two sorts. In the one, incidents and agents were to be, in part at least, supernatural, and the excellence aimed at was to consist in the interesting of the affections by the dramatic truth of such emotions, as would naturally accompany such situations, supposing them real. And real in this sense they have been to every human being who, from whatever source of delusion, has at any time believed himself under supernatural agency. For the second class, subjects were to be chosen from ordinary life...With this view I wrote the 'Ancient Mariner'.

And a final thought on the well-known lines:

Water, water, every where,

And all the boards did shrink;

Water, water, every where,

Nor any drop to drink.

followed by hallucinations of slimy things may refer not to the mariners dying of thirst so much as them finding themselves without any alcoholic drink - sailors of this period would have a daily ration of a quarter pint of neat rum twice a day. Water stored in casks would have gone bad on long sea journeys - a fact well-known in the previous centuries of sea travel.

Read the poem here http://www.gutenberg.org/files/151/151-h/151-h.htm and more on drunken sailors here http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8859000/8859506.stm.

Poetry statues

I had the great pleasure of meeting an old Finnish man shortly before Burns night (our Scottish celebration of the poet Robert Burns on the 25th January each year) and he told me of his worship of Burns.

"There are many statues of Burns" he explained, "throughout Finland and Russia." It didn't surprise me for who couldn't love Burns' work and his message. But then he added, "And of Walter Scott too."

That stopped me. The man had come to Abbotsford Scott's house having made his pilgrimage to Alloway Burn's birthplace. He spoke English with some difficulty but offered several corrections to the information on the display boards in the house. He knew Scott as if personally.

Why? To Finns and Russians and Czechs and many more Scott was a great nationalist pushing countries to recover and expand their language with its historic words and rediscover their sense of identity.

In Scotland, it is a little different.

Glasgow is dumping Scott's statue unless it fits in with the new design scheme of George Square. The poet who celebrated the city in his book Rob Roy is well, what? I don't know... The old guard don't like Scott and they are the managers now.

Perhaps they should read the poems and the novels before making up their mind to erase what is celebrated and seen so differently in the rest of the world.

You can find out more here http://www.architectsjournal.co.uk/news/opinion/glasgow-says-goodbye-to-sir-walter-scott/8640085.article