42 Thoughts are things

In calling me a defeatist, Miss Plum must be following some higher plan for my good. I don’t want to believe that she takes evil pleasure from destroying the hopes of a young artist, but I certainly wouldn’t put it past her.
When I quote the phrase ‘thoughts are things’, which she frequently uses when interpreting some incident or statement, I realize that much of her cunning lies in the kind of suggestiveness she employs, possibly subconsciously. That would at least be a merciful explanation. I would like to ward off this superstitious curse she seems to be putting on me, but I do not have her ruthlessness and determination. She has not got where she is without a fair share of both. Her energy is poured lavishly into what she thinks of as her teaching, which is basically only remarkable for her alarming ineptness at handling people who do not come to her with a high enough standard of vocal skill and experience.

And of course, the pedagogic value of the words ‘yes’ and ‘no’ is arguably limited. Voice is an abstract entity and it is not necessary to understand how it functions in order to be able to sing. In fact, a surfeit of technique can be more of a hindrance than a help. But when all is said and done, the yes-no construct is all there is to the vocal training inflicted upon us in that Persian-carpeted, mirrored studio.

It goes like this: If you do it right, she shouts ‘Yes!’ and if she thinks it's wrong, she shouts ‘No!’

There is no reliable definition of “right” and “wrong” in this system. On days when her hearing is particularly astute, you might find yourself in the wrong all the time. On other days, particularly if she has been invited out to some grand evening function or other, she is relatively merciful and has been known to allow the lucky ones to finish a phrase or two.

But trial and error are usually the order of the day, and if you err too seriously or too frequently, you are rewarded with an elaborate account of how she got it right plus the added bonus of your subsequent very own attack of laryngitis. The problem is that it is impossible to hide behind vocal exercises that are difficult and extreme and not chosen to suit a particular voice, but expected in all keys from all voices. But be it on her head only, though her students bear the consequences, that we all sing exactly the same exercises in exactly the same keys at exactly the same speed and in exactly the same order from the first day to the last.

Among the 6 first chosen to take her lessons there are no male students, but a year later she is allotted a couple and then, at the latest, I realize that she really has no idea how she got where she was and definitely does not remember the things she was taught in the early days of her own training.

What she demands of us is incessant, merciless repetition of the training programme she had reached at the end of her own vocal training, when her main vocal advisor was a pianist coach who guided her early operatic years and – as she intimates on a number of occasions - quite a large proportion of her life outside the studio, though I hasten to add that she defended her erotic innocence to the very end.

She has a high student drop-out rate. She doesn’t seem to realize that you have to tell people what you want before you can get them to do it. An instinctive singer can probably cope with her method by largely ignoring it; advanced students take what they need from a coaching session and disregard the rest. Miss Plum's pedagogic system is not based on widely accepted practices, but on her own iron will to achieve her own thing. Take it or leave it.

Miss Plum goes a step further down the road to my possible destruction by demanding that I take her a new song to every single lesson. She never places this onus on anyone else and never forgets it with me. The pressure is enormous. The fruits are meagre. It’s her way of getting round her own pedagogic insufficiency. I cannot possibly learn all those songs. And anyway, many of them are unsuitable, some downright inappropriate. She couldn’t care less. She thumbs through the volumes of songs and defaces the contents with large crosses to show which ones I am to learn next. One day, when I do not produce a new song for one reason or another, she initiates a screaming match. She actually manages to provoke me into screaming back at her. When it gets too hot for me to handle, I make for the door. By now, to the chagrin of other long-standing teachers, we have taken residence in the most coveted studio on the fifth floor. Tis room is larger, has a larger grand piano, a larger Persian carpet and a larger mirror. Before putting the double door of the studio between us, leaving my stack of songbooks on the piano, I tell her she can sing the damn songs herself in future. I fly down the stairs. As I reach the second floor, all my song books hurtle past me. She has aimed them at me, but I am a moving target and she is poor aim.

That may have been a turning point in our relationship. We didn’t like each other any better, but from then on I detected a certain sneaking respect for me in her manner. I just continued the play-acting.

It is a happy day for us all when she decides to coach singers from Covent Garden during our official lesson times, though I am naturally unaffected by this, since I have my lessons at the crack of dawn. But the others get gentler treatment when she knows that someone will be coming at 2 p.m. to boost her ego with masterly renderings of Puccini or Verdi, and being a captive audience during these sessions is certainly more educational than anything else I have experienced so far.

At the end of that first day Gray and I go into the canteen to lick our wounds. We are sure the other teachers are sorry for us, and that feeling continues for the whole of my 6 years at the Academy.

In an effort to secure our loyalty to this great prima donna, we have been told how privileged we are to have singing lessons from a really famous personage, and have been prepared to be in wonder and awe, but we can already sense that this famous personage is indifferent to our individual needs and cares, and we are too inexperienced to handle it.

All round us there is excitement. But we sit there discouraged and disconsolate. We are victims of our accident of birth. We cannot fight against the cumulative effects of our geographical and astrological origins.

It is going to be a long haul.

That much we do know.