Once, in Paris, I’d listened to a beautiful countertenor from Martinique sing Pergolesi in Saint-Séverin, the wooden pillars (the one behind the altar shaped like a tree) and ancient pews providing a rich soundboard for those devotions. I was drawn to his voice, recognizing something completely new to me; but I hadn’t known how to proceed with that insight. I returned to our hotel on the Left Bank, past the square with its grove of plane trees, the bistro tables chained to a tree, and a man asleep on a bench, newspapers wrapped around his torso. I hummed what I remembered of what I’d heard, and for once I didn’t have to stretch for high notes.
When I was in high school, I sang in our choir. I loved singing. I wasn’t particularly good at it but there was the moment, particularly when our choir practised a madrigal, when I could hear the voices braiding elegantly together and knew I was part of this effort; the moment when the puzzling notation made sense in a way that mathematical equations seldom did.
I’d love to have continued with the choir but I didn’t get along with its master. He was a diminutive man who wore his hair combed straight up to add an inch or two to his height. He was fussy, his mouth pursed like the anus of a cat, and he preened in front of us during practice. He didn’t like me and I didn’t like him. I admit now I had attitude — I was sixteen, after all — and was easily distracted. But the occasions when we performed and our harmonies were true and clear were as lovely to me as anything in those years. I never received a mark higher than a C in the choir, but given his knowledge of music and his ability to develop true skills in many of his students, I wish my relationship with the choirmaster had been different.
I began to tentatively hum along to certain arias, after figuring out how the recitative worked: it followed the patterns of speech, the contours of the spoken voice, it seemed to me, and wasn’t dependent upon musical structure exactly. The recits advanced the dramatic action of an opera’s narrative and the arias opened up the emotional or lyric possibilities of the drama. I entered this musical territory as a complete neophyte, trying to make sense of it on a remote acreage on the Sechelt Peninsula, music playing as I went about my daily tasks. I’d pause in the kneading of bread dough to hear James Bowman in Handel’s wonderful oratorio, The Choice of Hercules, thinking how smoky and rich his voice in the late recitative, “The sounds breathe fire,” and the following aria, “Lead Goddess lead the way.” I hung out the laundry, listening to Montserrat Caballé sing “Chi il bel sogno di Doretta” from La Rondine (The Swallow) while all around, the violet-green swallows whirled and dipped.
I loved Handel, finding in his compositions a grand and stately sweep, a generosity to the human voice. The ornamentations weren’t just musical acrobatic manoeuvres, but provided natural moments for the singer to engage in something gorgeous and somehow humane — dramatic strength in service to lyrical beauty.
I was recognizing how suited a countertenor voice was to Handel and Purcell, so too the mezzo-soprano voice. In reading I’ve done, I’ve come to understand there are opposing schools of thought (or belief) about role assignations in Handel’s oratorios and operas. It reminds me of similar arguments about staging Shakespeare — the gender changes, the debates on the appropriation of voice.
Should a countertenor sing a female role straight or in drag? Should a woman play a man — the trouser roles — as a man, or should her hair tumble down to show us her true nature? Was it Auden who spoke of the tyranny of the pronoun? Never mind. It was fascinating to hear everything: countertenors singing the Sorceress in Dido and Aeneas, mezzo-sopranos singing Orfeo in Gluck’s divine opera of the same name. The music wanted what it wanted — a voice to enter a role, to caress it, claim it, offer it to a woman in a house in a remote forest, leaning on a broom, in tears.
My hummings became a little less tentative. I’d peer at the small print of the librettos often included with CDs, and attempt to sing. Well, to be honest, I croaked. There was something distinctly raven-like in the sounds that came from my throat. This came as no real surprise. I was surrounded by these birds. On my daily walks, humming and trying to sing, their music was as much a part of my life as that of the opera singers I was listening to.
The ravens are engaging in their vocalizations, sitting in a tall cedar and speculating on the human world below them. Croanq? Klook? There is a soft krrrr and a long watery gurgle that could go on for some bars, the improvisation of a skilled coloratura, shading and embellishing the notes. And the tok, tok, tok — a sound I can mimic by pushing and flattening my tongue up behind my teeth and striking it against my palate. When ravens fly past as I walk over the mail or else dig in the vegetable garden, I make this sound. Almost without fail, the birds do an about-turn, turn on the wing and fly over again, heads quizzically cocked. Tok, tok, tok, they’d reply, and wait for a response. We have a brief interchange — I hesitate to call it a conversation, though certainly sounds are made, mimicked, on both sides. Once they determine I’m not a bird, or maybe just because I bore them, they go back to what they were doing. Which often seems to be looking for trouble. Or roadkill.
I’ve noticed in our area that ravens use the Sunshine Coast Highway as a food lane, and it’s not surprising that such intelligent birds have figured out the patterns of squirrel and raccoon deaths. One day there will be a dead animal on the side of the road, and within a very short period of time, a gang of ravens will have cleaned up the mess, muttering and squabbling as they do so. Often a scout will fly low to the pavement, scanning the edges of the road; if I wait long enough, I might see the same bird (or at least I think it’s the same bird) returning to the area above the Malaspina substation where there’s a huge roost. It will yell as it flies.
In his remarkable book, Ravens in Winter, Bernd Heinrich suggests that ravens have a series of sounds used to invite others to share their food, the kind of behaviour that humans would do well to emulate. (An aria from Theodora as the table is set, the platters laid out for all to partake.)
Sometimes on the stretch of highway near my home, a deer struck by a car will stagger to the roadside or just into the woods to die. Not long after, I’ve heard the specific raven yelps that bring other birds. Although I have no hard data, I assume, with the confidence that comes from a long residence in a place, that a message has been sent out to announce that a carcass has been found and that feasting can commence. That’s certainly what happens, in much the same sequence, time after time. Now that there are coyotes in our area, and more recently, wolves, I think that interspecies cooperation will develop as the teeth and claws of the mammals prove to be an efficient way to open the bodies; once the wolves and coyotes have eaten their fill, the ravens can come to finish up.
When we walk up behind the Malaspina hydro substation, we often hear the ravens at the roost, yelling and uttering a sound nearer to a yelp. This area is home to a herd of Roosevelt elk. In calving season, I have to wonder if a vulnerable elk calf has been spotted and the alert has gone out to all members of the team. Sometimes we find coyote scats composed of fine beige hair, as though from the young body of a calf. Little slivers of bone, those delicate ankles.
These are stories redolent with operatic pathos — a bull elk gathering his terrified harem as a chorus is sounded closer and closer, a single young female yearling left on her own as the others flee to safety in the dense understory. Think of her in her golden brown summer pelage, eyes filled with the sight of the low bodies of wolves as they approach, aiming for the throat. And the whole while, the ravens making their own dark commentary, the woods loud with their gulps and chortles, a particularly sinister chuckle. “Fly, fly, my brethren, heathen rage pursues us swift, / Arm’d with the terrors of insulting death.”4
Because “Ombra mai fu” consumed my imagination, I wanted to know more about plane trees, remembering their occurrence and shade in the cities and towns I’d visited in Europe. And it seemed that once I was alerted to them, they began to make their presence known in unexpected places. I was reading Virgil, The Geo
rgics, and there they were!
He set in rows his elms when well along,
Pear trees already hard, and blackthorn sloes,
Planes large enough to offer drinkers shade.5
I remembered the square with its waiting table and how we often found such places ourselves to drink a glass of Prosecco on our way back to our hotel. How the heart longs for green shade in hot climates as the heart longs for music in a quiet house.
A specimen of Platanus orientalis grown from seeds gathered at Thermopylae in 1802 flourishes in the Fellows’ Garden of Emmanuel College, Cambridge. This is no homage to Xerxes, whose army suffered disproportionate losses at Thermopylae by the Greeks, in part because Xerxes had been so distracted by love for the tree, first encountered by the River Meander, that he didn’t keep up the necessary military vigilance. (Or so Herodotus tells us in the Histories.)
Another magnificent plane tree of this species grows on the island of Kos and is purported to be the tree under which Hippocrates lectured. Imagine for a moment a generation of young physicians listening to their teacher, their faces dappled with sunlight filtered through the broad green leaves. Imagine one of them idly running his thumb along the prickly surface of a seed vessel, wondering about anatomy and the detachment with which his teacher described his belief that diseases had to do with the environment, with wind and water and weather, and his theories concerning the insufficiency of air experienced by those suffering from epilepsy.6
Plane trees have been around for a long time. They exist in the fossil record from the mid-Cretaceous period, roughly 100 million years ago, looking surprisingly like their contemporary selves.7 They grow well in hot climates as well as harsh climates — the Persians call them chenar, the Americans, sycamores. Their leaves are shaped like goose-feet, or (more whimsically) like a map of the Peloponnese.8 I liked that they were described in terms of both a bird and a geographic location, as though everyone would have a clear image of each in their minds.
On my daughter’s recent trip to Greece to study classical archaeological sites, I asked her to bring me home a leaf from a plane tree growing at Thermopylae, wanting that connection to the aria I’d grown to love. She wasn’t sure which trees they were and brought instead a tiny fragment of Lapis lacedaemonius, the stone from which the monument to the three hundred Spartan warriors was built.
The famous London plane is believed to be a hybrid of the American and Oriental varieties, perhaps the result of a natural marriage between trees from Greece and America in the Lambeth garden of John Tradescant, gardener to Charles I. I remember the plane trees of Berkeley Square, their plated bark, and the renown they achieved for being able to withstand pollution — those dense coal fogs of London — though when I saw them as a young woman working in Wimbledon and wandering the leafy boroughs on my days off, the air was considerably cleaner. In those years I attended concerts at the Royal Festival Hall, waiting until the last minute to buy tickets in the gods (the cheapest seats or even standing room in the very rafters of the hall) — Janet Baker singing Handel in her rich mezzo voice. Passing the plane trees as a twenty-year-old, I never dreamed I would want to sing of them one day.
Emperor Caligula made a dining room within the confines of a plane tree’s trunk, one of those ostentatious things that one somehow expects an emperor to do.9 Not unlike Xerxes, perhaps, hanging the branches of his tree with golden ornaments and appointing one of his Immortals to care for it for its lifetime. Cara d’amabile, soave piu . . . In his Sylva, the esteemed John Evelyn remarked of the plane tree, “Pliny tells us there is no Tree whatsoever which so well defends us from the heat of the Sun in Summer; nor that admits it more kindly in Winter.”10 The more I read, and remembered, the more I realized that the plane tree was rooted in our cultural history as firmly as the olives and oaks I already knew and revered. A heart could be bound to its boughs and leaves as mine had been to the rough bark of the Garry oak in childhood. And the more I read, the more I wanted to sing the aria which had taken me to its shade.
I don’t know why it took so long but I finally realized I could take voice lessons and see if I might develop not only my singing voice, but also my knowledge of music. All the years I was raising my children, it wouldn’t have occurred to me to indulge myself this way; there wasn’t time and not much extra money. But the summer before I turned fifty, I asked a few people for recommendations and was told that I would learn a lot from Shelley Dillon, and that I would love her too. I had met her once, at an event for Earth Day in Roberts Creek: the Goddesses Concert. Women performers had been invited and were taken to a table with a sign: “Reserved for Goddesses and their escorts.” (This should happen to every woman at least once in her lifetime, the opportunity to lead her husband or significant other to such a table . . .) I’d been invited to read my poems, the only non-musical Goddess of the evening. Shelley was there with her singing partner, soprano Jo Hammond. I remember their performance vividly — Jo’s high sweet voice and Shelley’s lower, rich one.
So I called Shelley and set up a trial lesson to see what might be done. Her studio was around the back of an attractive low house and overlooked a lovely garden full of azaleas, magnolias, vines over a twiggy pergola. Di vegetabile! Birds enjoyed the feeders and the shelter of the trees. There was a grand piano on a pretty Persian carpet, a stand for music, a waiting area green with plants. A red metronome. Folders containing sheet music were laid out neatly on a shelf. In addition to her voice students, Shelley taught piano. I was nervous.
So much in our culture requires us to maintain the privacy of our mouths. We don’t bare our teeth unless we have a good reason or are with intimates; we don’t show our open throats; we keep our voices low. I felt shy about following the simplest of instructions: to lower my jaw to make more room; to raise the soft palate; to do an exercise for the correct placement of my breastbone. Bursts of breath through pursed lips. Contorting my facial muscles. And the scales! Oh, I was embarrassed at the sour notes that came from my mouth, that suddenly disappointing orifice. But Shelley was so kind and so helpful that I found myself arranging a regular schedule of lessons and trying to articulate what kind of music it was I wanted to sing.
I thought that this would be like beginner’s piano, and remembered an old friend telling me that her husband had bought her a piano for her fiftieth birthday. She arranged for lessons, somehow imagining she would be playing Mozart within weeks. She was humbled to discover that she would be working on “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” for what seemed like months. Intense desire doesn’t always translate to even modest ability.
I thought maybe folk songs would be the way to begin and we started with “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens.” My attempts were thin and squeaky. And yet it felt wonderful to sing. To try to sing. For several lessons, we practised that song and once I was praised for adding a grace note. I didn’t know what that was, but was pleased beyond what was reasonable. When Shelley asked what I wanted to sing next, I wondered if we might try an aria. That aria. “Ombra mai fu.” David Daniels made it sound so effortless. She smiled. “If you were a fifteen-year-old girl wanting a career as a singer, I’d tell you that you weren’t ready yet. But I think you’ll learn a lot from trying, so why not?”
Shelley played the opening bars of “Ombra mai fu.” My heart began to race and I could feel my shoulders tensing. I wanted so badly to do some sort of justice not just to the song but to the woman who sat at Homesite Creek and wept for the beauty of those words in her small car . . . David Daniels’s offering of them, the way they eased into my heart like a homecoming, a blessing for trees and the solace of their shade.
Of course I mangled it. Everything conspired against me, myself most of all. My lack of musical ear, breath control, agility, and support; but I knew I wanted to keep trying. Driving home, I’d sing the scales over and over, attempt the arpeggios — and could manage perhaps three without the comfort of the piano to guide me up and down.
And there would be the audience of ravens a
s I drove the long highway home, standing on the roadsides with their complicit gazes, the little falsetto yelps as I passed. Sometimes I’d stop the car to see what it was they were doing. There might be a flattened squirrel or snake, depending on the season, but often there would be nothing that I could determine might attract them to stand around as though waiting. As though waiting for me to let them know how the lessons were going.
An Unkindness of Ravens
Ravens mate for life although infidelity is not unknown. They have the largest brain of any songbird. They have learned to make use of sticks and other things as rudimentary tools. Their vocabulary is considerable. The ones we know on the west coast of British Columbia are thought to have come over the Bering land bridge from Asia. Their name, Corvus corax, has classical roots: the genus, Corvus, comes from Latin; the specific name, corax, from the Greek. In Old English, they were hraefn, in Old Norse, hrafn. These ancient words contain something of the raspy noise of their language! What comes first, a name or a sound? Is this the chicken and the egg riddle? I imagine the ravens waiting for a hen to leave its eggs unattended, and then swooping in to feast on the rich yolk. If a tiny embryo had already formed, so much the better. The ravens certainly wouldn’t have been participants in a debate about their origins but might have been seen in the distance, muttering, taking any opportunity for a meal.
The girl from piano
I am remembering that first lesson. While I tried to sing “Come All Ye Fair and Tender Maidens,” a little girl slipped in the door of the studio, brushing by the rosemary shrub at the threshold so that the entire room filled with its resiny odour. She sat on the chair in the waiting area, clutching her sheaf of music, watching me with the intense fierce look of a girl who doesn’t miss a trick. I know, because I was once that girl too, eyes open to the world and all that it might offer or deny. This little girl had red curls, only one front tooth, and freckles over her nose.
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